O, Sweet Saint Of San Andreas

Roadkill 42 Comments

Hear my prayer.

On Jan. 1, [California] will become the first state in the nation to charge industries across the economy for the greenhouse gases they emit. Under the system, known as “cap and trade,” the state will set an overall ceiling on those emissions and assign allowable emission amounts for individual polluters. A portion of these so-called allowances will be allocated to utilities, manufacturers and others; the remainder will be auctioned off.
[…]
The outsize goals of California’s new law, known as A.B. 32, are to lower California’s emissions to what they were in 1990 by 2020 — a reduction of roughly 30 percent — and, more broadly, to show that the system works and can be replicated.
The risks for California are enormous. Opponents and supporters alike worry that the program could hurt the state’s fragile economy by driving out refineries, cement makers, glass factories and other businesses. Some are concerned that companies will find a way to outmaneuver the system, causing the state to fall short of its emission reduction targets.
“The worst possible thing to happen is if it fails,” said Robert N. Stavins, a Harvard economist.

Related: More Fraud Exposed in Green Carbon Trading Scheme

The Sound Of Settled Science

Uncategorized 28 Comments

Daily Mail;

The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.
The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.
This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.

The trump card presidency

Uncategorized 12 Comments

Hillbuzz’s Kevin DuJan:

When the books are written on the last four years, I think it will be clear that most of what Democrats tried to shove through couldn’t have been done if the President was white…because racialist demagoguery was key to making a lot of these things happen. From 2008 through 2010 or so, it was nonstop screams of “If you don’t support Obama, you are a racist!”. Democrats who weren’t leftists (and there used to be some of these in the party) had to go along with whatever Obama wanted because they, too, would have been declared racists for not supporting him. Hence, that Christmas Eve 2009 vote for Obamacare in the Senate where not a single Democrat read the bill or understood what it would do to the country…but they all voted for it anyway. Democrats needed a black president to make that happen, because only the threat of being called racists could make all Democrats in the Senate abandon their constituents and their duties as elected officials and vote for something they never read and didn’t understand.

Read Dujan’s “Evidence that Democrats are in ‘Last Days of Pompeii’ mode” here.
h/t

Your Modern Educators, Hard at Work

Baiting The Left 36 Comments

The Florida State Board of Education has passed a new strategic plan:
For reading at or above the grade level, the goals are as follows:
– 90 percent of Asian students
– 88 percent of White students
– 81 percent of Hispanic students
– 74 percent of Black students
For math at or above the grade level, the goals are as follows:
– 92 percent of Asian students
– 86 percent of White students
– 80 percent of Hispanic students
– 74 percent of Black students
Proponents bearing the soft prejudice of low expectations have won. Game over.

TBTF Lives!

More Money Than Brains 19 Comments

And George Will is worried and unhappy:

If in four weeks a president-elect Mitt Romney is seeking a Treasury secretary, he should look here, to Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Candidate Romney can enhance his chance of having this choice to make by embracing a simple proposition from Fisher: Systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs), meaning too-big-to-fail (TBTF) banks, are “too dangerous to permit.”..
There are 6,000 American banks, but “half of the entire banking industry’s assets” are concentrated in five institutions whose combined assets amount to almost 60 percent of the gross domestic product. And “the top 10 banks now account for 61 percent of commercial banking assets, substantially more than the 26 percent of only 20 years ago.”..
Capitalism — which is, as Milton Friedman tirelessly insisted, a profit and loss system — is subverted by TBTF, which socializes losses while leaving profits private. And which enhances the profits of those whose losses it socializes. TBTF is a double moral disaster: It creates moral hazard by encouraging risky behavior, and it delegitimizes capitalism by validating public cynicism about its risk-reward ratios.
It is inexplicable politics and regrettable policy that Romney has, so far, flinched from a forthright endorsement of breaking up the biggest banks…

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

The One 35 Comments

Via NRO;

Now, it seems, that Team Obama has decided to try and save U.N. ambassador Susan Rice — whose reputation in the IC could hardly be lower — and perhaps press secretary Jay Carney as well by tossing the nation’s spooks under the bus, in which direction they’re also nudging Hillary Clinton.

Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors

Media 20 Comments

Festering the problem, many reporters, thought leaders in the press, and news executives rarely encounter people in the heartland any more. The Mississippi River Valley is something to be flown over instead of studied and covered unless there is a natural disaster. Additionally, the new breed of political reporter knows little about politics before Bush v. Gore, couldn’t care less to have a sense of history to give them perspective, embraces the cosmopolitan culture of elite environs in New York and Washington diving only into hipster dive bars to drink Pabst Blue Ribbon to connect in some superficial way with the rest of the country, leans left socially and fiscally, and maintains an increasingly secular world view nearly identical to that of their other young, hipster reporter friends. “Professing themselves wise, they became fools . . . ”
It is a painful truth.
But there is more.

h/t EBD

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