Hot Take: Brett Kavanaugh Could End Voting Rights!!!!!1!!!!

The same people who always claim to be the smartest people in the room sure seem like unhinged prophets of doom. Here’s Ari Berman in the NY Times

Does Brett Kavanaugh Spell the End of Voting Rights?
If he is confirmed to the Supreme Court, we will see the most extreme court on civil rights since the er of Jim Crow (you know, that thing invented by Democrats)

In late 2011, the Obama administration blocked a South Carolina law that required voters to show a photo ID before casting their ballots, finding that it could disenfranchise tens of thousands of minority voters, who were more likely than whites to lack such IDs.

But when South Carolina asked a federal court in Washington to approve the law, Brett Kavanaugh wrote the opinion upholding it. He ruled that the measure was not discriminatory, even though the Obama administration claimed that it violated the Voting Rights Act.

Judge Kavanaugh, whom President Trump nominated for the Supreme Court recently, pointed to a 2008 Supreme Court decision upholding Indiana’s voter ID law, which he interpreted as giving states broad leeway to restrict their voting procedures. “Many states, particularly in the wake of the voting system problems exposed during the 2000 elections, have enacted stronger voter ID laws, among various other recent changes to voting laws,” he noted in approval.

So, wait, I thought that Democrats were all about upholding previous court decisions? Or does that only apply to Roe v Wade? Remember, these same Democrats want people to show photo ID and have a background check (I have no problem with this) for all gun purchases. They also want you to get a license. Yet, they are against photo ID to simply cast a vote. Something which most people have, and will be provided for lost cost or even free in the states that require one to vote. I’ve covered this way in the past many times. You need an ID to get into a DNC convention: why not to vote? Many, many states require ID to vote, including Democrat led ones.

In addition to voter ID laws, these “recent changes to voting laws” include polling place closings, new hurdles to voter registration, and cutbacks in early voting days. Since 2011, some 22 states, mostly controlled by Republicans, have passed laws to restrict access to the ballot, which disproportionately target Democratic constituencies such as people of color.

What he’s complaining about is early voting, when, in fact, the Constitution lays out a specific day for voting. But, what does that have to do with Kavanaugh? Nothing. In fact, the next eight paragraphs are just whines at Chief Justice Roberts and such.

Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination signals a disturbing shift in the historic role of the court. In the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement looked to the Supreme Court for help in dismantling the architecture of white supremacy. And the court responded by desegregating public schools, upholding the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act and legalizing interracial marriage, to name a few landmark decisions. Representative John Lewis of Georgia described the court in those days as a “sympathetic referee.”

That era of strong civil rights enforcement is over. With Judge Kavanaugh on the bench, this will be the most extreme court on civil rights issues since the days of Jim Crow.

This is what’s called “making shit up” because you’re unhinged.

Read: Hot Take: Brett Kavanaugh Could End Voting Rights!!!!!1!!!! »

Your Carbon Pollution Is Driving Conflict And Extremism In Africa

Everything was peachy keen in Africa prior to fossil fueled vehicles, you know

African activist: Climate change is fueling conflict, extremism

An African woman whose people are nomads constantly searching for food and water told Security Council members Wednesday they must consider climate change as a security risk that is fueling extremism, conflict and migration.

Hindou Ibrahim said in a speech to the council that climate change is affecting the daily lives of people in the vast Sahel region who depend on agriculture, fishing and livestock and are struggling to survive.

She said the scarcity of resources has fueled internal migration as well as migration through Africa to Europe, sparked local conflicts that become national and regional and led to the growth of terrorist groups.

Ibrahim, an activist from Chad who co-chairs the International Indigenous People Forum on Climate, which promotes UN action on climate change, urged the council and the broader international community to take action to help them cope.

It couldn’t possibly be that there have always been these problems, and that the extremism is caused by the spread of 9th Century radical Islam, right? Nope. Gotta be you using air conditioning and taking long showers.

“Solutions are there,” she said. “Why not give them access to energy? You can help them go to school. You can help them to get health (care). You can help them to do another alternative in their life and keep them in peace and think about the future.”

I agree, they should have access to cheap, efficient, reliable energy like fossil fuels. Not sure if I’d want to trust nuclear power plants in most of these nations.

Really, what this is all about is wanting more and more of that sweet, sweet climate cash from 1st World nations. As pushed by professional parasites, er, activists.

Read: Your Carbon Pollution Is Driving Conflict And Extremism In Africa »

If All You See…

…is a sprawling city that needs to be drastically built up to be an urban area ’cause carbon emissions, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Weasel Zippers, with a post on an illegal alien reunification feel good story.

Read: If All You See… »

Ireland Becomes First Nation To Divest From Fossil Fuels (Which Government Will Still Use)

This is supposed to be super duper crazy big news, especially for a nation that is 2nd worst for tackling Hotcoldwetdry in Europe

From the article (which is basically mirrored all over the leftist news as being super awesome news)

The Republic of Ireland will become the world’s first country to sell off its investments in fossil fuel companies, after a bill was passed with all-party support in the lower house of parliament.

The state’s €8bn national investment fund will be required to sell all investments in coal, oil, gas and peat “as soon as is practicable”, which is expected to mean within five years. Norway’s huge $1tn sovereign wealth fund has only partially divested from fossil fuels, targeting some coal companies, and is still considering its oil and gas holdings.

The fossil fuel divestment movement has grown rapidly and trillions of dollars of investment funds have been divested, including large pension funds and insurers, cities such as New York, churches and universities.

Supporters of divestment say existing fossil fuel resources are already far greater than can be burned without causing catastrophic climate change and that exploring and producing more fossil fuels is therefore morally wrong and economically risky. However, some critics argue say that remaining as shareholders and persuading fossil fuel companies to change can be more effective.

Soooooooo, the government is just selling its investments, and won’t actually stop using fossil fuels? They’ll still use them for their fossil fueled garbage collection, at airports, road repair, elected politicians and non-elected bureaucrats traveling around the country and the world? This is just silly “look at what we’re doing!!!!!” action, which really does little.

The Irish fossil fuel divestment bill was passed in the lower house of parliament on Thursday and it is expected to pass rapidly through the upper house, meaning it could become law before the end of the year. The Irish state investment fund holds more than €300m in fossil fuel investments in 150 companies.

So, for all the hyperventilating from Warmist news orgs this hasn’t actually been passed and become law? Huh.

Éamonn Meehan, executive director of international development charity Trócaire, said: “Today the Oireachtas [Irish parliament] has sent a powerful signal to the international community about the need to speed up the phase-out of fossil fuels.”

But, it’s not actually being phased out. Government are still using it, as does the private sector. Bunch of climahypocrites.

Read: Ireland Becomes First Nation To Divest From Fossil Fuels (Which Government Will Still Use) »

Brett Kavanaugh Sorta Believes In ‘Climate Change’, But, That’s Bad News Or Something

Ever since President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, there have been many in the Warmist community who have freaked out. We get things like

Then we have Warmist Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic

Brett Kavanaugh: ‘The Earth Is Warming’
Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court affirms climate change—but that’s not necessarily good news for the EPA.

It probably isn’t surprising that Judge Brett Kavanaugh—a longtime member of the conservative movement whom President Trump nominated to the Supreme Court on Monday—has written about climate change.

What might be surprising is that he says it’s real.

“The earth is warming. Humans are contributing,” he told a federal courtroom two years ago, during a hearing about a major Barack Obama climate policy. “There is a moral imperative. There is a huge policy imperative. The pope’s involved.”

He’s even inscribed this view in his judicial opinions. “The task of dealing with global warming is urgent and important at the national and international level,” he wrote in 2013.

That’s concerning for me, but, not too much. I agree that humans are contributing, I just see it as minimal and not dangerous. But, Kavanaugh hasn’t ever seen to let his political beliefs get in the way of his rulings, excepting his belief in the Constitution. But, anyhow

Yet this is not necessarily good news for liberals. Kavanaugh has sometimes sympathized with the need for environmental protection. But because he considers global warming to be charged with a “huge policy imperative,” he’s skeptical that the Environment Protection Agency (or the executive branch) should be fighting it alone. And as a future justice, he’s likely to block the agency from doing so.

It is a portentous moment for U.S. environmental law. President Obama spent much of his last term trying to deploy the EPA—and one of its animating laws, the Clean Air Act—against the threat of climate change. The Trump administration has devoted its energy to undoing this work, and environmental groups are trying to block him.

Obama spent time passing shaky regulations that kept getting blocked in court, such as the Clean Air Act, which never went into effect to start with.

“We probably have more of a record for Kavanaugh for environmental law than we do for anyone else in recent memory,” Lazarus told me. “Roberts came from the D.C. Circuit, Scalia came from the D.C. Circuit, Ginsburg did, Thomas did—but none of them had the same number of EPA cases that Kavanaugh’s had.”

He has not been a friend of the agency, though he often appears sympathetic to it. Kavanaugh has emerged as a courteous jurist who is intensely skeptical of whether the EPA can legally regulate new environmental threats, experts told me.

And, on that record

Kavanaugh is particularly skeptical of new EPA programs. Like Scalia, he argues that the agency should only issue a new rule if Congress granted them explicit, precise rules to do so in a piece of legislation, like the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act.

Well, that’s shocking! A belief that the duly elected Legislative Branch should pass laws that are explicit to get things done, rather than massive mission creep and Executive Office agencies creating rules and regulations out of thin air? That’s totally outside the mainstream!

Adler, the conservative law professor, agreed that Kavanaugh might strike down future climate rules from the EPA.“I get that the environmental community looks at him and says, He’s going to get in the way of aggressive climate regulation unless Congress does something. And he might.”

“But if climate change is a problem, and it is; and if we should be doing something about it, which we should; then barring some massive technological breakthrough, unless and until Congress steps up to the plate, we’re kind of screwed,” he said.

And rightly so. If Warmists believe so hard, they should make an argument and attempt to pass legislation, not jam it through the EO agencies. And, show us that they really believe by changing their own lives to match their beliefs.

Read: Brett Kavanaugh Sorta Believes In ‘Climate Change’, But, That’s Bad News Or Something »

Dems Aren’t Happy That GOP Will Vote On Dems “Abolish ICE” Bill

Democrats have been running with their #AbolishICE meme for weeks now. So, what happens when their legislation is being given a vote? Shot

(The Hill) House GOP leaders plan to bring a Democratic measure calling for the abolishment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the House floor, hoping to force Democrats into a difficult vote.

The Democratic bill, introduced Thursday, would create a commission to examine ICE’s responsibilities and then recommend transferring them to other agencies.

Republicans see the growing “abolish ICE” movement as a political winner that will make at least some Democrats running in swing districts uncomfortable. (snip)

The Establishing a Humane Immigration Enforcement System Act was introduced Thursday by Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.).

They argue that ICE, which was created in 2003 as part of a new Homeland Security Department, has become “militarized” in its approach to deportations.

“President Trump’s blanket directive to round up and target all undocumented immigrants underscores the unchecked power which ICE has used to terrorize our communities,” Pocan said in a statement. “From conducting raids at garden centers and meatpacking plants to targeting families outside churches and schools, the president is using ICE as a mass-deportation force to rip apart the moral fabric of our nation.”

The main point of Congress is to vote on legislation, is it not? Chaser

(The Hill) A group of Democrats who introduced legislation to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said they will vote against the measure if GOP leadership follows through with their vow to bring it to the House floor.

Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.) released a statement Thursday accusing GOP leaders of exploiting the legislation for political gain after leadership confirmed it planned to hold a vote.

While the Democratic lawmakers said they plan to vote against their own measure – which would create a commission to examine ICE’s responsibilities and then recommend transferring them to other agencies – they said they welcome the opportunity for debate.

“We know Speaker Ryan is not serious about passing our ‘Establishing a Humane Immigration Enforcement System Act,’ so members of Congress, advocacy groups, and impacted communities will not engage in this political stunt,” the Democrats said in a joint statement.

This reminds me of the many times that Republicans forced a vote on many things that Democrats were pushing, only to have it called a stunt, such as when Mitch McConnell forced the Senate to vote on Obama’s extreme budgets, and Democrats voted against them. Dingy Harry Reid called it a “stunt” to have to actually vote. In this case, Democrats never thought that the GOP would call their bluff using legislation Democrats wrote.

Read: Dems Aren’t Happy That GOP Will Vote On Dems “Abolish ICE” Bill »

Surprise: Coastal Shorelines Mostly Stable Or Growing

You know how climate doom from Other People using fossil fueled vehicles, buy products, using air conditioning, taking showers longer than 2 minutes, etc and so on is supposed to cause sea level doom? Never mind

(NoTricksZone) Accelerating sea level rise due to global warming is supposed to eat away at the shorelines across the globe. However a recent paper published in the journal Nature here authored by a team scientists led by Arjen Luijendijk found that some 75% of the world’s sandy shorelines are stable or growing!

An analysis of satellite-derived shoreline data indicates that 24% of the world’s sandy beaches are eroding at rates exceeding 0.5 m/yr, but 28% are accreting and 48% are stable.

Also erosion rates exceed 5 m/yr along 4% of the sandy shoreline and are greater than 10 m/yr for 2% of the global sandy shoreline.

According to the paper, the application of an automated shoreline detection method to the sandy shorelines resulted in a global dataset of shoreline change rates for the 33 year period 1984–2016.

The scientists also found that Australia and Africa are the only continents for which net erosion (−0.20 m/yr and −0.07 m/yr respectively) is found, with all other continents showing net accretion.

What does all this mean

[Aftab Alam Khan at the Department of Geology, University of Dhaka in Bangladesh] added that the prediction of 4–6.6 ft sea level rise in the next 91 years between 2009 and 2100 is “highly erroneous”!

It means that things on Earth change, sometimes quickly, sometimes not, and that this Holocene warm period is nothing to be concerned about. It’s primarily natural.

Of course, members of the Cult of Climastrology will say “it might not be happening yet, but it’s coming! Doom soon!”

Read: Surprise: Coastal Shorelines Mostly Stable Or Growing »

If All You See…

…is a horrible, electricity sucking smartphone, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is America’s Watchtower, with a post on Rod Rosenstein’s unusual request on Brett Kavenaugh.

Read: If All You See… »

NY Times Wonders If ‘Climate Change’ Has Something To Do With Thailand Floods

In the wake of the kids being trapped in the cave, you just knew someone had to run something like this. In this case, it’s the NY Times’ Nadja Popovich and Kendra Pierre-louis, who want to remind us that no one’s suggesting that the kids being trapped was climate change, it’s just climate change

Does Climate Change Have Anything to Do With Floods in Thailand?

After 12 members of a youth soccer team and their coach were trapped in the Tham Luang Cave in northern Thailand nearly three weeks ago, their plight, and then their rescue, captured the world’s attention.

By now, it’s well known that their predicament was caused by rising floodwaters in the cave. What is less known is that the pattern of precipitation that ensnared them is in keeping with broader changes to the region’s seasonal monsoon that researchers have attributed to climate change.

“Over the South Asian landmass, we’ve seen that extreme rainfall events have become more frequent,” said Amit Tandon, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth who studies ocean systems.

No one is suggesting that climate change itself was responsible for trapping the boys in the cave. Brief downpours have always been common during Thailand’s wet season, which runs from late May to early October. Periods of a week or two of relatively heavy rainfall are punctuated by drier periods.

See? No one is suggesting. They’re just hintimating. Climaggesting?

The alternating dry and wet periods are called the intraseasonal oscillation, said Arnold L. Gordon, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University. That variation has always happened, unrelated to climate change. But what has changed in recent years is that those wet periods have been wetter.

“It’s likely climate change, in the sense that there’s more moisture in the air,” Dr. Gordon said. Warmer air can hold more moisture, and “when the air has more moisture in it, you would get wetter wet bands and drier dry bands,” he said.

Which is not proof of man-caused climate change, just that climate changes. Which it always does.

Flash floods were known to be a danger in the cave, and a sign at the entrance warned against entering in the rainy season. But the strongest rains normally begin in July, so the boys and their coach may have been caught off guard when they ventured inside the relatively dry cave on June 23. Though the total June rainfall in the area, 9.6 inches, was only slightly higher than average, five of those inches fell between June 21 and 28, according to Eric Leister, a senior meteorologist with AccuWeather. The resulting floodwaters trapped the team and complicated rescue efforts.

And taken altogether, it sure looks like ‘climate change’ is being blamed, does it not?

Read: NY Times Wonders If ‘Climate Change’ Has Something To Do With Thailand Floods »

Landmark Settlement Is A Nightmare For Gun Grabbers, Especially On “Assault Rifles”

This is bad news for the anti-gun crowd (who often have firearms themselves (see Alyssa Milano’s husband) and/or armed protection, at times weapons that the average American is banned from having), but not as bad as being portrayed, except for one thing

A LANDMARK LEGAL SHIFT OPENS PANDORA’S BOX FOR DIY GUNS

FIVE YEARS AGO, 25-year-old radical libertarian Cody Wilson stood on a remote central Texas gun range and pulled the trigger on the world’s first fully 3-D-printed gun. When, to his relief, his plastic invention fired a .380-caliber bullet into a berm of dirt without jamming or exploding in his hands, he drove back to Austin and uploaded the blueprints for the pistol to his website, Defcad.com.

He’d launched the site months earlier along with an anarchist video manifesto, declaring that gun control would never be the same in an era when anyone can download and print their own firearm with a few clicks. In the days after that first test-firing, his gun was downloaded more than 100,000 times. Wilson made the decision to go all in on the project, dropping out of law school at the University of Texas, as if to confirm his belief that technology supersedes law.

The law caught up. Less than a week later, Wilson received a letter from the US State Department demanding that he take down his printable-gun blueprints or face prosecution for violating federal export controls. Under an obscure set of US regulations known as the International Trade in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Wilson was accused of exporting weapons without a license, just as if he’d shipped his plastic gun to Mexico rather than put a digital version of it on the internet. He took Defcad.com offline, but his lawyer warned him that he still potentially faced millions of dollars in fines and years in prison simply for having made the file available to overseas downloaders for a few days. “I thought my life was over,” Wilson says.

Instead, Wilson has spent the last years on an unlikely project for an anarchist: Not simply defying or skirting the law but taking it to court and changing it. In doing so, he has now not only defeated a legal threat to his own highly controversial gunsmithing project. He may have also unlocked a new era of digital DIY gunmaking that further undermines gun control across the United States and the world—another step toward Wilson’s imagined future where anyone can make a deadly weapon at home with no government oversight.

As you can guess, Mr. Wilson won his suit.

Two months ago, the Department of Justice quietly offered Wilson a settlement to end a lawsuit he and a group of co-plaintiffs have pursued since 2015 against the United States government. Wilson and his team of lawyers focused their legal argument on a free speech claim: They pointed out that by forbidding Wilson from posting his 3-D-printable data, the State Department was not only violating his right to bear arms but his right to freely share information. By blurring the line between a gun and a digital file, Wilson had also successfully blurred the lines between the Second Amendment and the First.

This has caused the gun grabbers to freak out, because it means anyone can download the “code”, which is considered Free Speech now, and manufacture a firearm using 3D technology. You know, something very few of us have access to. We’d need parts and machinery and stuff, so, it’s not as easy as it is being portrayed.

Furthermore, just because anyone can download the instructions now as free speech, it doesn’t mean that state government cannot pass laws (in some cases, more laws) about these types of firearms to restrict the manufacture of them, require serial numbers, registration, and so forth. And criminals will do what criminals do, so, once the blueprints were out there, nothing was going to stop that. But, the average criminal, gang banger, etc, do not have access to 3D machines, either.

Here’s the really important part of the settlement

As part of the settlement, the government acknowledges that “non-automatic firearms up to .50-caliber” such as the popular AR-15 and other semi-autos, are not “military” in nature, which Alan Gottlieb with the SAF said is a huge win. “For years, anti-gunners have contended that modern semi-automatic sport-utility rifles are so-called ‘weapons of war,’ and with this settlement, the government has acknowledged they are nothing of the sort,” he said in a statement.

The gun grabbers will still try and portray them as “weapons of war”, because they found a talking point, and they rarely give them up. But, per the US Department Of Justice, they aren’t. Not that they ever were. What dummy carries a semi-automatic rifle to war anymore?

Read: Landmark Settlement Is A Nightmare For Gun Grabbers, Especially On “Assault Rifles” »

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