Climate Wackos To Protest At White House Correspondent’s Dinner

By William Teach April 29, 2023 – 7:15 am

Will any of them note the massive use of fossil fuels for the attendees of the dinner to show up? How about Biden’s massive use of fossil fuels?

Climate change activists plan protest at White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Climate change activists have announced plans to protest at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday where President Joe Biden is set to speak.

Climate Defiance organizers told ABC News that they plan to blockade the area near the dinner on Saturday night is an effort to hold Biden, who announced his reelection bid on Tuesday, accountable for what they say was his 2020 campaign promise to end fossil fuel extraction on public lands.

“Number one, no more subsidies for fossil fuel industry. No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period, ends,” Biden said at a March 2020 Democratic presidential debate.

The group is asking protesters to congregate at a Metro station near the Washington Hilton, the hotel where Biden is set to deliver remarks at the annual dinner featuring an audience of Washington’s news media.

It’s 1.4 miles from the White House to the Washington Hilton. How big will Biden’s fossil fueled convoy be? How many of these climawackos will take fossil fueled trips to D.C./Washington Hilton? Will they take fossil fueled travel to somewhere near DC and take the metro, which has a station .4 miles south of the Hilton? How much energy will they use to upload their videos?

“Washington Hilton respects all parties’ rights to express their points of view in lawful and non-disruptive manners; however, we are simultaneously committed to protecting our Team Members’ and guests’ safety and security,” a Hilton spokesperson said. “We will take all necessary steps, in cooperation with local law enforcement officials, to ensure such activities do not interfere with those entering and leaving the hotel.”

In other words, it’s not OK to mess with Democrats.

Here’s another group of climate Comrades earlier in the week

Read: Climate Wackos To Protest At White House Correspondent’s Dinner »

Posted in AGW Idiocy, Democrats, Global Warming | 6 Comments | Trackback URL

NC Supreme Court Says Drawing Election Maps, Passing Voter ID Up To General Assembly, Not Judges

By William Teach April 29, 2023 – 7:00 am

This has made Democrats Very Upset, because they aren’t in charge of drawing the maps. If they were, they’d gerrymander like mad. They are also upset over requiring that voters show who they are to vote, and, remember, Democrats are so racist that they claim that black people cannot get ID

NC Supreme Court says judges can’t stop partisan gerrymandering

The Republican majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court said Friday that partisan gerrymandering is legal in the state, opening the door for the legislature’s GOP majority to draw districts that help lock in power at the statehouse and contribute to Republican power in Congress.

The state’s high court also decided two long-running voting cases Friday: One dealing with the restoration of voting rights for felons and the other one of the state’s long-running voter ID cases.

The voter ID and gerrymandering decisions reverse opinions issued just last year by the state Supreme Court. In between, North Carolina voters flipped the court’s majority from Democratic to Republican. Friday’s opinions broke on party lines.

Chief Justice Paul Newby said the state’s judiciary doesn’t have the power to weigh in on partisan gerrymandering, and even if it did, the issue relies too much on the eye of the beholder to be decided by the courts.

“Our constitution expressly assigns the redistricting authority to the General Assembly subject to explicit limitations in the text,” Newby wrote in an opinion joined by the court’s other Republican justices, including Justice Phil Berger Jr., whose father is the Senate’s top Republican, and Justice Tamara Barringer, a former state Senator.

In other words, the general assembly has the power to draw the maps per the NC Constitution. It’s their power. The districts used to be pretty gerrymandered to favor Democrats when they controlled the GA.

“Those [constitutional] limitations do not address partisan gerrymandering,” Newby wrote. “It is not within the authority of this Court to amend the constitution to create such limitations on a responsibility that is textually assigned to another branch. Furthermore, were this court to create such a limitation, there is no judicially discoverable or manageable standard for adjudicating such claims. The constitution does not require or permit a standard known only to four justices.”

Obviously, the Democrats on the court are for the court amending the NC Constitution, since they cannot be in charge of drawing the maps.

The Court also said that voter ID is constitutional

“This law is one of the least restrictive voter identification laws in the United States,” he wrote. “Even if a registered voter still somehow fails to obtain or otherwise possess an acceptable form of identification, the law permits him or her to cast a provisional ballot that will be counted so long as they do not provide false information in the reasonable impediment affidavit. Essentially, North Carolina’s photo identification statute does not require that an individual present a photo identification to vote.”

Democrats are caterwauling over this. I wonder why?

In the felon voting case, Community Success Initiative v. Moore, the court reversed a trial court’s finding that allowed convicted felons to vote once they finished their prison sentence. The Supreme Court ruled that felons must complete all aspects of their sentence, including probation and/or payment of fines or restitution, in order to register and vote. The court’s Republican said this rule is not racist, as plaintiffs alleged.

That’s what the law says. Hence the ruling.

Read: NC Supreme Court Says Drawing Election Maps, Passing Voter ID Up To General Assembly, Not Judges »

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California Wants Trains To Be Zero Emission By 2030

By William Teach April 28, 2023 – 3:12 pm

Hey, guess who’s going to pay for most of this, because a goodly chunk of the trains are owned and operated by government, and any who are private will pass the costs on to consumers

California to Require ‘Zero Emissions’ Passenger Trains After 2030, Freight After 2035

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has enacted new regulations that will require “zero emissions” trains to be introduced after 2030, focusing on a sector often seen as a “green” alternative to cars and trucks.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Under the new regulations, zero-emissions models will be required for all switch, industrial and passenger locomotives built after 2030 and for all freight line locomotives built after 2035. Any non-zero emissions locomotive that is 23 years old or more will not be allowed to operate in the state past 2030.

The regulations also require train operators to open a spending account by July 2024 that they must deposit into every year to purchase or lease cleaner diesel trains and buy zero-emissions infrastructure. Operators that generate more pollutants are required to deposit more into the spending account, and the amount required to be deposited would also increase every year.

It is unclear how the new regulations on trains would affect interstate commerce, which is regulated by Congress under the U.S. Constitution, since many trains in California also travel through other states.

Good question: what about Amtrak? What about freight trains that cross into and out of California? Oh, hey, what’s this going to do the already insanely overpriced bullet train, which is years behind and has not even started any operations? Is it even possible to do away with diesel powered trains in favor of electric? Does the board understand how heavy they are and how much power it requires to get them moving and stop them, particularly for freight trains? Perhaps operators like CSX and Union Pacific should stop at the state line and say “come and get the goods.” There’s seriously no replacement.

Now, when it comes to subways and smaller passenger lines, sure, they could potentially replace them with electric. And the taxes of the Comrades in the People’s Republik Of California will get to foot the bill.

Read: California Wants Trains To Be Zero Emission By 2030 »

Posted in AGW Idiocy, Global Warming | 7 Comments | Trackback URL

If All You See…

By William Teach April 28, 2023 – 1:00 pm

…is a horrible pool made with lots of carbon intensive concrete, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Moonbattery, with a post on pedophiles becoming a protected class in Minnesota.

Read: If All You See… »

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Surprise: NY Times Says Inflation Is Still Going Fast

By William Teach April 28, 2023 – 10:30 am

Didn’t they tell us that inflation was transitory? That it was no big deal? Also that it had nothing to do with the terrible policies of Biden and the Democrats? (non-paywalled version here)

Still Going Fast, Inflation Changes Drivers

America is now two years into abnormally high inflation — and while the nation appears to be past the worst phase of the biggest spike in price increases in half a century, the road back to normal is a long and uncertain one.

The pop in prices over the 24 months that ended in March eroded wage gains, burdened consumers and spurred a Federal Reserve response that has the potential to cause a recession.

What generated the painful inflation, and what comes next? A look through the data reveals a situation that arose from pandemic disruptions and the government’s response, was worsened by the war in Ukraine and is now cooling as supply problems clear up and the economy slows. But it also illustrates that U.S. inflation today is drastically different from the price increases that first appeared in 2021, driven by stubborn price increases for services like airfare and child care instead of by the cost of goods.

Certainly, the crazy government spending during 2020 did not help, but, most of the lockdowns were instituted by Democrats in Democratic states and cities. Then the crazy spending in 2021 and 2022. Who did that? And the US does not get much from Ukraine which would drive inflation and reduce goods.

The Fed aims for 2% inflation on average over time using the personal consumption expenditures index, which will be released Friday. That figure pulls some of its data from the consumer price index report, which was released two weeks ago and offered a clear picture of the recent inflation trajectory.

Before the pandemic, inflation hovered around 2% as measured by the overall consumer price index and by a “core” measure that strips out food and fuel prices to get a clearer sense of the underlying trend. It dropped sharply at the pandemic’s start in early 2020 as people stayed home and stopped spending money, then rebounded starting in March 2021.

Except, prices are already high, and are mostly not coming down.

In fact, services prices are now the very center of the inflation story.

They could soon start to fade in one key area. Housing costs have been picking up quickly for months, but rent increases have recently slowed in real-time private sector data. That is expected to feed into official inflation numbers by later this year.

That has left policymakers focused on other services, which span an array of purchases including medical care, car repairs and many vacation expenses. How quickly those prices — often called “core services ex-housing” — can retreat will determine whether and when inflation can return to normal.

Good luck with that. And the last thing we need are politicians of any party to muck around with the economy, since most of them really have no idea, as quite a few haven’t worked in the private sector in decades. The top occupation is public service/politics, followed by business (which doesn’t necessarily mean they ran a business), then law, then education. Biden hasn’t even worked in the private sector since 1972. None of them know what they’re doing, and their advisors are no better. Pumping all that cash into the economy was not a good thing.

Good thing that Inflation Reduction Act is working miracles, eh?

Read: Surprise: NY Times Says Inflation Is Still Going Fast »

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High Flying Gavin Newsom “Flames” Ron Johnson On Climate Doom Or Something

By William Teach April 28, 2023 – 7:15 am

People’s Republik Of California governor Gavin Newsom, who likes to take lots of fossil fueled flights and limo rides, thinks he has the dunk

Gov. Gavin Newsom Flames Sen. Ron Johnson’s Climate Crisis Spin With Just 8 Words

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) attempted to put a positive spin on global warming and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) wasn’t there for it.

During Wednesday’s Senate Budget Committee hearing on health care costs associated with the climate crisis, Johnson tried to argue that projected rising temperatures would benefit the United States and Wisconsin because fewer people would die from the cold.

“In terms of excess deaths, a warming globe is actually beneficial,” Johnson told University of Chicago economics professor Michael Greenstone, citing Greenstone’s research that suggests cold areas will see reduced mortality but warm areas will see a major increase.

It’s a hell of a lot better than going back into a Holocene cool period (which will happen eventually)

Every single wildfire in California has been shown to be due to incompetence or being set intentionally or unintentionally. Not because it is 1.5 degrees F higher than it was back in 1850. If Gavin believes the slight warming is the fault of Mankind then why hasn’t he stopped using fossil fuels himself? And banned all his people from using them? He could ban all government employees from taking fossil fueled travel. Put up solar panels and wind turbines at the governor’s mansion.

But, remember, Doing Something about ‘climate change’ is always about forcing you to do something, not those who push this the hardest.

Read: High Flying Gavin Newsom “Flames” Ron Johnson On Climate Doom Or Something »

Posted in Climahypocrites, Democrats, Global Warming | 6 Comments | Trackback URL

More Americans Support Scary Looking Rifles And Semi-Automatic Guns Ban Or Something

By William Teach April 28, 2023 – 7:00 am

I’m pretty sure that our constitutional rights are not subject to the whims of voters, unless they can amend the Constitution

More voters support assault weapons ban over arming citizens to reduce violence: poll

More U.S. voters support banning assault weapons over arming citizens to reduce gun violence, according to a Fox News poll released on Thursday.

While 45 percent of those surveyed said they would encourage more citizens to carry guns to defend against attackers, 61 percent said they favored banning assault rifles and semi-automatic weapons.

Huge majorities in the poll also supported a wide variety of gun safety measures, including 87 percent who said they backed requiring background checks for all gun purchases.

Another 81 percent supported improving enforcement of gun laws and raising the legal minimum age to buy guns to 21, the poll found.

I have zero problem with background checks for all firearm purchases, including transfers from person to another. I’ve said it again and again. But, that’s not what Democrats want. They want to make the checks so onerous that citizens are denied their 2nd Amendment right, as well as track every single purchase, what is being purchased, and where it will be kept. And the same for ammo.

Ban “assault rifles”? Criminals will not care. And others can just buy non-scary rifles. The smarty pants one is how Fox slipped in the bit about semi-auto, which shows what the gun grabbers really want. Well, to start with,

How about we just enforce existing gun laws? The same people who want to raise the age to 21 also want 16 year olds to vote. The Supreme Court will have something to say if Los Federales try it.

Eight in 10 also said that mental health checks should be required for all gun buyers and that police should temporarily be able to take guns away from people who have been shown to be a danger to themselves or others.

I’m for this, but, the law would have to be very, very specific to keep government from going too far and blocking some people from legally acquiring a gun. It would definitely require a hearing in front of a judge within days, and the government should be paying for a qualified lawyer.

However, despite widespread support for such measures, only 43 percent said stricter gun control laws would make the country safer, while one-quarter said it would make the U.S. less safe, the poll found.

So, if they wouldn’t make us safer, then what’s the point?

Read: More Americans Support Scary Looking Rifles And Semi-Automatic Guns Ban Or Something »

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Bill McKibben Says People Need To Say Yes To Green Energy In Our Backyards

By William Teach April 27, 2023 – 3:00 pm

Well, good luck with this, Bill, because, as he actually points out in this very long, meandering piece, enviroweenies/climate cultists keep saying no to it. They’re often fine if it is Somewhere Else. Remember the fight over Cape Wind, where John Kerry and Ted Kennedy, among others, were dead set against it, because it was where they sail? I’ve written many, many blog posts on the E/CCs blocking “green” energy projects around the world.

Yes in Our Backyards

I’m an environmentalist, which means I’ve got some practice in saying no. It’s what we do: John Muir saying no to the destruction of Yosemite helped kick off environmentalism; Rachel Carson said no to DDT; the Sierra Club said no to the damming of the Grand Canyon. We’re often quite good at it, and thank heaven; I’ll go to my grave satisfied by, if nothing else, having played some part in stopping Big Oil from building the Keystone XL pipeline 1,700 miles across the heart of the continent. Right now I’m deeply engaged with American colleagues in trying to stop our big banks from funding fossil fuel expansion, and rooting on friends in Africa as they battle the giant EACOP pipeline, and watching with admiration as European confreres fight plans to expand coal mines at the expense of forests and villages. In a world where giant corporations, and the governments they too often control, ceaselessly do dangerous and unnecessary things, saying no is a valuable survival skill for civilizations.

But we’re at a hinge moment now, when solving our biggest problems—environmental but also social—means we need to say yes to some things: solar panels and wind turbines and factories to make batteries and mines to extract lithium. And new affordable housing that will make cities denser and more efficient while cutting the ruinous price of housing. And—well, it’s a long list. And in every case there are both benefits and costs, all played out in particular places with particular histories. But what interests me is the search for some general principles that might make these disputes easier, at least for people of good will. I’m thinking of people like me: older white people, a class particularly used to working the system, and perhaps psychologically tilted toward keeping things the way they are.

I suggest we start in deep Blue areas, where the people who support this the most live. Bill goes on to tell the story of how an old mine in northern NY wanted to put up 10 wind turbines, and most of the locals were fine with this, but, the wacko-enviros were dead set against it, and

I wrote a piece for the New York Times saying just that (that they needed to be built, because some sacrifice needed to be made, as he describes in the previous paragraphs), and earned in the process the enmity of some of the region’s professional environmentalists (and they won the fight; there are no wind turbines). But it felt as if I’d been true to the place by saying no to one plan, and yes to another. The dump was just a stupid idea; the wind turbines, though they came with drawbacks, were a necessary one.

Well, good on Bill to back his beliefs

Right now we’re at a moment when we need to build in a way we haven’t for quite a while, maybe since the days of the New Deal and the Second World War. The consensus among scientists and engineers who study this stuff is that we need to replace about a billion machines in America alone—regular cars with EVs or e-bikes, furnaces with heat pumps. And to run them on clean power, we need to build out lots of solar panels and wind farms and battery arrays. The factories to churn these things out are going up fast, in response to the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. But once this stuff has emerged from the factory, it needs to go in someone’s basement, someone’s kitchen, someone’s…backyard. Transmission lines have to cross fields; railroad tracks need to be built through rights of way. Some NIMBY passion will need to be replaced by some YIMBY enthusiasm—or at least some acquiescence.

Central Park would be a fantastic place to put up solar panels and wind turbines, eh? How about Cape Cod and the Hamptons? Rehoboth Beach in Delaware, near Biden’s beach house? The White House lawn? The bay outside San Francisco and the waters of Boston and Chicago? I’m sure you can think of some other great places.

Again, this is an extraordinarily long piece, which meanders. I think Bill would have been better served really just coming straight out with his point that E/CCs need to stop saying NIMBY and accept, even, as he writes, “grudgingly”, green energy and transmission lines in their areas.

And, because this was found at Real Clear Politics, the very next linked piece is

The inhumanity of the green agenda
The ‘sustainability’ regime is impoverishing the world.

‘Man is the measure of all things’, Greek philosopher Protagoras wrote over 2,500 years ago. Unfortunately, our elites today tend not to see it that way.

In recent years, the overused word ‘sustainability’ has fostered a narrative in which human needs and aspirations have taken a back seat to the green austerity of Net Zero and ‘degrowth’. The ruling classes of a fading West are determined to save the planet by immiserating their fellow citizens. Their agenda is expected to cost the world $6 trillion per year for the next 30 years. Meanwhile, they will get to harvest massive green subsidies and live like Renaissance potentates.

I’ll leave the rest to you.

Read: Bill McKibben Says People Need To Say Yes To Green Energy In Our Backyards »

Posted in Enviroweenies, Global Warming | 5 Comments | Trackback URL

If All You See…

By William Teach April 27, 2023 – 1:00 pm

…is an evil fossil fueled vehicle, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Sister Toldjah, with a post on Eric “Fang Fang” Swalwell not being happy about being dinged yet again.

Read: If All You See… »

Posted in If All You See | 4 Comments | Trackback URL

Gabby Giffords: “No More Guns. Gone.”

By William Teach April 27, 2023 – 10:30 am

It’s a very interesting statement from someone who owns a gun herself, as does her husband, and is constantly surrounded by people armed with firearms who protect her

‘No More Guns. Gone’: Why Gabby Giffords Isn’t Giving Up

Gabby Giffords’ black SUV rolled through the security blockade and right to the southern entrance of the U.S. Capitol, to be greeted by a former colleague and a half-dozen current and former staffers. After quick hugs and hellos, Giffords leaned on the cane in her left hand, made her way up the slight ramp and then down through the labyrinth of back halls and passages and elevators toward a basement conference room.

It was a homecoming of sorts for the ex-Congresswoman and survivor of an assassination attempt. But she wasn’t there on Wednesday to reminisce. She was there to make the same case she has been making for the last ten years.

“I’m Gabby Giffords. I’m from Tucson, Ariz. Jan. 8, 2011, changed my life forever. I was a Congresswoman. I was shot in my head while meeting with my constituents,” Giffords said as she sat down at a roundtable of current and former lawmakers to discuss the next steps in their work to curb gun violence. “After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, I said enough is enough. I founded a group called Giffords. We are on a mission to end gun violence now.”

Her group spends most of their time advocating for restrictions that hit the law abiding, rather than the criminal element, and their true goal is the total ban of guns from the hands of the average non-criminal American. They’ll all sit there and say “no, no, we just want common sense gun control.”

A day before Giffords returned to the Capitol, we sat down at her organization’s headquarters in Washington, a corporate-tinged space a block north of the fabled lobbying K Street corridor. A professional as always, Giffords was ready to make the case that gun laws were getting stricter, lives were being saved, and hope was in the offing during an exclusive interview with TIME. Despite a landscape that seems bleak for anyone who supports limiting the ability to buy and sell guns in this country, Giffords and its allies have been able to pass 525 state-level laws restricting access to firearms over the last decade—nothing to sneeze at in the least. Her youth-organizing program just turned five and has about 75 alumni who continue to work in their local communities. And 460 Giffords-backed candidates have been elected to state or federal office, according to the group’s accounting.

“Inch by inch. Capitals, capitals, capitals,” Giffords says in describing the incremental and far-flung set of goals.

That inch by inch thing is why Republicans cannot give in on any sort of legislation, because if you give the gun grabbers this and that, they want the other. And then some more of this and that and the other. If you gave them every bit of legislation they have demanded, they would want more, right up to the Australian solution. And Time Magazine really buries the headline at almost the end of the long article

As we wrap our interview in her office, I ask how she keeps coming back to a challenge so deeply ingrained in politics. She pauses for 12 pregnant seconds.

“No more guns,” she says.

Ambler, her aide and adviser, tries to clarify that she means no more gun violence, but Giffords is clear about what she’s saying. “No, no, no,” she says. “Lord, no.” She pauses another 32 seconds. “Guns, guns, guns. No more guns. Gone.”

It’s simple: she’s saying what she means. No more firearms for you. No more citizens with firearms to protect themselves and their families. The gun grabbers will tell you what they want if you listen.

An aide clarifies that she’s talking about Australia, where gun sales were outlawed after a mass shooting and existing weapons were purchased by the government. Giffords nods in the affirmative. It’s an idealistic goal, for sure, and one perhaps mismatched for the moment in this country. But Giffords has an answer for that: “Legislation, legislation, legislation.”

In other words, the aid realized that Giffords let the cat out of the bag. Reports show that maybe only 30% of guns were turned in after Australia passed that law, but, they do not have something like our 2nd Amendment.

Read: Gabby Giffords: “No More Guns. Gone.” »

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