Democrat House Approves A “Clean Energy” Bill Or Something

By William Teach September 26, 2020 – 7:24 am

Is this a serious bill or something to tell their unhinged base “look, we passed something”?

House passes sweeping clean energy bill

The House on Thursday passed a broad bill that aims to boost energy efficiency and renewable energy sources as part of an attempt to combat climate change.

The chamber approved the 900-page Clean Energy and Jobs Innovation Act in a 220-185 vote.

The legislation would create research and development programs for solar, wind, advanced geothermal energy and hydroelectric power as well as lessening pollution from fossil fuel production.

It would also establish more rigorous building codes and bolster energy efficiency requirements and weatherization programs.

The bill moved rapidly through the House. It was first introduced last week and did not go through any legislative hearings.

Meanwhile, AOC’s Green New Deal is languishing in committee.

A similar energy innovation package that was introduced in the Senate earlier this year has recently been reenergized after legislators came to an agreement on an amendment seeking to phase down the use of a type of greenhouse gas.

A senior House Democratic aide told The Hill that if the Senate passes its own bill, the chambers can go to conference to resolve their disagreements. The aide said that House Democrats urge Republicans to take some action on clean energy, either moving by their own bill or taking up the House bill.

But, that bill is mostly crafted by Democrats, who do not run the Senate.

The top Republicans on the Natural Resources, Energy and Commerce and Transportation and Infrastructure Committees released a joint statement criticizing the legislation this week.

“Here we are in the middle of a global pandemic and Speaker Pelosi wants to spend more than $135 billion on a piece of legislation that will never become law,” said Reps. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), Greg Walden (R-Ore.), and Frank Lucas (R-Okla.). “This bill is chock-full of government mandates that would raise what Americans pay for everything from the vehicles they drive to what they pay to heat, cool, and power their homes.”

What are some of those mandates? And what of the real purpose of this bill?

(NRDC) This bill reforms and builds up grant programs in energy efficiency, clean transportation, grid modernization, and workforce development which will kick start efforts in communities to start moving faster into the clean economy. For example, this bill would update energy efficiency standards for buildings, which on its own could save consumers and businesses $51 billion on their electricity bills by 2050 while also avoiding 1.3 billion tons of carbon pollution. Proven programs like the Weatherization Assistance Program and Energy Efficiency Community Block Grant are given needed boosts in funding which get them closer to meeting strong demand, and new programs are created where needed. The bill would authorize almost $40 billion in transportation electrification grants and other clean transportation deployment and manufacturing programs to cut pollution from cars, trucks, and buses; $27 billion in programs to accelerate deployment of energy efficiency; and more than $6 billion to modernize the electricity grid. It also stands up new workforce training programs to get our workers ready for the new jobs that will be created in the clean economy.

Seems reasonable, eh? Though, it has the potential to raise housing costs.

Making Environmental Justice a Priority
While this bill focuses a lot on technology, it importantly includes a lengthy title on improving outcomes for communities that for too long have suffered from disproportionate levels of pollution, including low-income communities, communities of color, and others who have been marginalized. Under this bill, every agency of the federal government will be required to add environmental justice to its mission, and the 1994 environmental justice executive order will be incorporated into law. Additionally, environmental justice communities would be given more access to federal grant programs to support clean energy projects, but more importantly they will also receive more power to fight for their own healthy future.

And that is the main purpose, to incorporate the Cult of Climastrology in every federal agency decision, along with Dems notions of raaaaacism, giving the government more power over the lives of citizens, especially black and brown people.

Read: Democrat House Approves A “Clean Energy” Bill Or Something »

Posted in AGW Socialism, Democrats, Global Warming | 2 Comments | Trackback URL

Amy Coney Barrett Reported To Be Trump’s SCOTUS Pick, Who Might Let Down Conservatives Or Something

By William Teach September 26, 2020 – 7:08 am

All the “inside” reports are saying that Trump will nominate Barrett this afternoon, not a tough call, so, of course, the utterly and completely un-biased news along with Dem pundits are working to tell us why she is bad, such as

And, of course they think the adoption should be investigated. They’re also coming after her religion, leading to a piece by a college president and big time law teacher in defending her from those attacks. And then

Supreme Court favorite Amy Barrett thinks politics have no business in the courtroom. Critics aren’t convinced.

Many Republicans have hailed Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump’s apparent nominee to the Supreme Court to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as a dream candidate: a relatively young woman of impeccable conservative credentials. The federal circuit court judge believes that life begins at conception. She is a critic of the Affordable Care Act, the Obama-era health care law that Trump wants badly to dismantle. She has upheld restrictive immigration statutes while protecting corporations from lawsuits.

But she has also been consistently against injecting politics into the business of judging, presenting a potential problem for those who see the Supreme Court as a means of achieving ends not possible through legislation.

“I would have had no interest in the job if the job was about policymaking and about making policy decisions,” she said last year in an address at conservative Hillsdale College. “If we reduce the courts to mere politics, then why do we need them? We already have politicians,” Barrett added a little later. “Courts are not arenas for politics.”

Somehow, this is supposed to be a bad thing that she’s interested in deciding things based on the Constitution, rather than political belief.

“I conceive of justices as being driven by first-order commitments to constitutional methods rather than solely by partisan political preference,” she wrote in a 2013 article for the Texas Law Review. Later in the same article, she wrote that “partisan politics are not a good reason for overturning precedent. But neither are they a good reason for deciding a case of first impression.”

The word “precedent” is especially loaded when it comes to abortion. Precedent, on that issue, is Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania, both of which outlined conditions under which an abortion could be performed. Republicans’ judicial nominees worried that they will be depicted as abortion foes often make overtures about respecting precedent. They usually do so when pressed in a congressional hearing room, not in their own academic writings.

Notice that Democrats immediately jump to abortion on demand, because that is really their #1 Sacrament. How did one political party become so enamored with protecting the ability to kill the unborn?

Expect the serious hit pieces to start this evening and for Sunday editions

Read: Amy Coney Barrett Reported To Be Trump’s SCOTUS Pick, Who Might Let Down Conservatives Or Something »

Posted in Current Affairs | 55 Comments | Trackback URL

St. Greta Resumes Climate (scam) Strikes Or Something

By William Teach September 25, 2020 – 3:00 pm

This is definitely one of those “or something’s”

Greta Thunberg resumes school strikes for climate

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has resumed her school strikes on Friday.

Thunberg gathered with a dozen other demonstrators in front of Parliament in Stockholm as part of the global climate movement Fridays for Future.

Wait, how many?

That’s all they can get. Sure looks like this is super important for the kids…a few of them look like adults. There are a couple smart ones who aren’t wearing masks because they are over 6 feet away, though.

(UK Guardian) School pupils, youth activists and communities around the world have turned out for a day of climate strikes, intended to underscore the urgency of the climate crisis even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Social distancing and other Covid-19 control measures dampened the protests, but thousands of activists posted on social media and took to the streets to protest against the lack of climate action from world leaders. Strikes were scheduled in at least 3,500 locations around the globe.

Friday’s strikes – some in the form of mostly socially distanced physical marches on the streets, and some purely online meetings – were on a smaller scale and far more subdued than last year’s September week of action, in which at least 6 million people around the world were estimated to have taken part.

I wonder if lots more of the Klimate Kiddies realize that lockdown is the world they’re trying to create with their policy positions.

Oh, and this doesn’t look like it’s about Science

Read More »

Read: St. Greta Resumes Climate (scam) Strikes Or Something »

Posted in AGW Socialism, Collapsing Science, Global Warming | 2 Comments | Trackback URL

If All You See…

By William Teach September 25, 2020 – 1:00 pm

…is a rough sea caused by Other People’s carbon pollution, you might just be a Warmist

View post on imgur.com

The blog of the day is Raised On Hoecakes, with a post on a kids’ controversial face mask.

Read: If All You See… »

Posted in If All You See | 2 Comments | Trackback URL

Strange: Suddenly Democrats Are Pushing For Voting In Person

By William Teach September 25, 2020 – 10:30 am

Hey, here’s Joe pushing vote in person, even as he hides in his basement

Two points: first, why do Democrats have such trouble voting in areas that are run fully by Democrats? All sorts of problems, including long lines and incompetent counts. Second, Joe is pushing vote in person!

Democrats’ mail voting pivot

Democrats spent the early months of the coronavirus pandemic urging their base to vote absentee. But as threats of U.S. Postal Service delays, Team Trump litigation and higher ballot rejection rates become clearer, many are pivoting to promote more in-person voting as well.

Why it matters: Democrats are exponentially more likely to vote by mail than Republicans this year — and if enough mail-in ballots are lost, rejected on a technicality or undercounted, it could change the outcome of the presidential election or other key races.

Driving the news: In Colorado, former Gov. John Hickenlooper, who’s running against Sen. Cory Gardner, told Axios that he’s encouraging voters to physically take their mail-in ballots to a dropbox and to do so “early, really early.”

Black PAC has moved from exclusively educating voters on voting by mail to informing about all available options: in-person, absentee, early voting and voting on Election Day.

The Collective PAC — the largest Black-led political action committee targeting Black voters and candidates — is pivoting, too. “We’re shifting away from making plans to vote by mail to voting early in person,” Quentin James, the group’s founder, told Axios.

Dems are starting to realize that there is lots of fraud, and their own ballots may get “lost” because the Democrats who run the voting in certain areas are incompetent. And that Dem voters may fail to put their ballots in their post box, or put them in too late, disqualifying them.

Last week, Joe Biden and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, voted in person one day before Delaware’s primary.

If they can do it, so can everyone else. And Democrats are concerned that people will wait till the last moment to mail in those ballots, meaning that lots of squishy Dems will see Low Energy Joe hiding in his basement and the gaffes and mental issues. What if that happens during a debate? How might that effect the vote, versus getting people to vote early?

On the first day of early in-person voting in Virginia, long lines formed quickly with voters waiting two hours or more to cast a ballot.

It’s September: why are we voting now?

(The Hill) A handful of ballots cast by members of the military for President Trump were found discarded in Pennsylvania, the Justice Department announced on Thursday.

Luzerne County District Attorney Stefanie Salavantis asked the DOJ and FBI to open an investigation into the discarded ballots on Monday following reports of “potential issues with a small number of mail-in ballots at the Luzerne County Board of Elections,” the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a release.

Democrats also might be realizing that cheating could come back to haunt them in the days and weeks after the election.

Read: Strange: Suddenly Democrats Are Pushing For Voting In Person »

Posted in Democrats, Election Fraud, Elections | 23 Comments | Trackback URL

Climate Cultists Recommend Climate Lockdowns To Stop ‘Climate Change’ (scam)

By William Teach September 25, 2020 – 8:15 am

I haven’t told this story in a while, so, way back in the 1980’s I was a believe in the notion that Mankind was mostly responsible for what was called global warming at the time. I even wrote a massive grad school paper on how ocean pollution from Mankind helped cause a lot of this. I switched to the skeptical side, with the notion that mankind was responsible for maybe, at most, 25%, in the early 2000’s, as I was able to get new Non-Approved information that was most certainly Wrongthink. And, among the things that made me switch was noticing that the grand poobahs in the Cult of Climastrology seemed to be pushing the same type of Big Government Progressive (nice Fascist) stuff that the Democrats were pushing, that far left (technically far, far right on the political scale) parties and such were pushing around the world, including the Marxists and Socialists. It was all about you being subservient to Government, about government controlling your life, including what you can say and what you can do.

People told me I was nuts back then, that this was about competing sciences. Interestingly, over the years, I see more and more of those who focused on the science starting to spend more and more time discussing the politics of this, because that is what it’s about, and here’s proof once again

From the screed

Under a “climate lockdown,” governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling. To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.

COVID-19 is itself a consequence of environmental degradation: one recent study dubbed it “the disease of the Anthropocene.” (or, it could be due to people eating bats. Or an incompetent bioweapons lab) Moreover, climate change will exacerbate the social and economic problems highlighted by the pandemic. These include governments’ diminishing capacity to address public-health crises, the private sector’s limited ability to withstand sustained economic disruption, and pervasive social inequality.

These shortcomings reflect the distorted values underlying our priorities. For example, we demand the most from “essential workers” (including nurses, supermarket workers, and delivery drivers) while paying them the least. Without fundamental change, climate change will worsen such problems.

Addressing this triple crisis requires reorienting corporate governance, finance, policy, and energy systems toward a green economic transformation. To achieve this, three obstacles must be removed: business that is shareholder-driven instead of stakeholder-driven, finance that is used in inadequate and inappropriate ways, and government that is based on outdated economic thinking and faulty assumptions.

Does this sound like science or a Cult that is using pretend science to achieve a political goal? The Nazi party used “science” that said that certain people, like Jews, were subhumans, to push their own hardcore government control. I’ve never understood how these hardcore lefties these days fail to understand that the bad parts of Progressivism/Marxism/Socialism/Authoritarian government would apply to their own lives.

Corporate governance must now reflect stakeholders’ needs instead of shareholders’ whims. Building an inclusive, sustainable economy depends on productive cooperation among the public and private sectors and civil society. This means firms need to listen to trade unions and workers’ collectives, community groups, consumer advocates, and others.

Does that sound like science or Modern Socialist talking points which hate capitalism and want Government in charge of the economy? There’s lots more in the screed that reinforces that this is not science. Surprise!

Read: Climate Cultists Recommend Climate Lockdowns To Stop ‘Climate Change’ (scam) »

Posted in AGW Socialism, Global Warming | 23 Comments | Trackback URL

Democrats Hot New Idea: Limit Supreme Court Justices To 18 Year Terms

By William Teach September 25, 2020 – 7:56 am

Interestingly, this really isn’t that bad of an idea. There are lots and lots of people on the right and left who think there should be term limits on Supreme Court justices as well as federally appointed judges. I certainly agree with it. But, let’s face it, this is simply the Democrats response to Trump getting another SCOTUS pick, a big stompy foot

Democrats prepare bill limiting U.S. Supreme Court justice terms to 18 years

Sore LosersDemocrats in of the House of Representatives will introduce a bill next week to limit the tenure of U.S. Supreme Court justices to 18 years from current lifetime appointments, in a bid to reduce partisan warring over vacancies and preserve the court’s legitimacy.

The new bill, seen by Reuters, would allow every president to nominate two justices per four-year term and comes amid heightened political tensions as Republican President Donald Trump prepares to announce his third pick for the Supreme Court after the death on Sept. 18 of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with just 40 days to go until the Nov. 3 election.

“It would save the country a lot of agony and help lower the temperature over fights for the court that go to the fault lines of cultural issues and is one of the primary things tearing at our social fabric,” said California U.S. Representative Ro Khanna, who plans to introduce the legislation on Tuesday, along with Representatives Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts and Don Beyer of Virginia. (snip)

Term limits for high court justices have for years had support from a number of legal scholars on both the right and the left. Several polls in recent years have also shown large majorities of the American public support term limits.

But, hey, doesn’t this rather require a Constitutional amendment?

Some legal observers, including those who favor term limits, say they must be accomplished through an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which has been interpreted as requiring life tenure for federal judges and justices.

The bill seeks to avoid constitutional concerns by exempting current justices from the 18-year rule. Those appointed under term limits would become “senior” upon retirement and rotate to lower courts.

Would this be Constitutional? Good question. It’s not so cut and dry an answer. What it does do is make it so a majority party with a same party president could simply pass a law doing away with the law, ending the limits. What this is all about is patronizing the Democratic base in an attempt to say “look, we’re doing something to counter Trump, all hail us!” And, like so many of the Big Ideas Dems have, such as the Green New Deal, it will languish in committee, with no movement and no discussion, much less getting a vote on the floor.

You can surely place a big bet that they do not want to go the Constitutional amendment route because then people will start talking heavily about needing term limits for Congress, and the elected Aristocracy do not want that. And it would give a good reason to work to get rid of the 17th Amendment, putting the appointment of Senators back in the hands of state General Assemblies, which would mean people would need to pay way more attention to their state governments, and Democrats do not want that to happen, either, especially when citizens would notice the issues with the state bureaucracies.

Place you money on it being introduced Tuesday, maybe even Monday, as a way to take some of the coverage off Trump’s pick, which he’s supposedly going to make Saturday, and then it disappearing into the Hole Of Liberal Ideas.

Read: Democrats Hot New Idea: Limit Supreme Court Justices To 18 Year Terms »

Posted in Barking Moonbats, Democrats | 2 Comments | Trackback URL

Climate Crisis (scam) Is Driven By White Supremacy Or Something

By William Teach September 24, 2020 – 3:45 pm

Here’s a hot take that I’ve never real seen before. Never discount the ability of cultists to come up with new stuff

How White Supremacy Caused the Climate Crisis

I write this today from California, a state currently besieged, yet again, by historic fires that are raging across the US West Coast just as other parts of the country also reel from the horrific outgrowths of the climate crisis — including deadly hurricanes on the US East Coast . In other places around the country, innocent people are being gunned down by police — and violent White supremacists — because of the color of their skin, or because they stand against the brutality of racism. How did the world arrive at a place where both nature and humanity suffer so severely, and in such a concurrent manner? And are these seemingly separate issues somehow profoundly linked? Did racism not only fuel horrific violence, but also global warming itself?

The climate crisis was and is fueled by a racial supremacy that has long devalued everything and everyone but the “chosen ones.” The hierarchical worldview of White supremacy means that moral value is measured by the profits and powers of that select group, to the detriment of everyone, and everything, else. Colonized peoples and lands are perceived only as tools for the accumulation of wealth and power. Oppression and destruction based on racialized, gendered, and other socially constructed categories are rooted in the idea that dominance and control are the “natural” rights of White people, particularly men.

The climate crisis “didn’t appear out of thin air. Someone did this to us: the fossil fuel industry and the governments that aided and abetted it,” writes climate justice essayist and writer Mary Annaïse Heglar. “The fossil fuel industry was born of the industrial revolution, which was born of slavery, which was born of colonialism.”

Adding to this, one could find a common thread present in colonialism, slavery, and the industrial revolution: White supremacy. For could colonialism or slavery exist without a culture and belief of racial supremacy? Scholars endlessly analyze the inner-workings of these complex and intertwined historical processes in search of causality. The truth is there are many chickens and many eggs in these stories, and yet a few constants as well. Hierarchical notions of humanity and race were ever-present in these histories — and they often serve as rationalizations for behaviors that have brought societies to various global crises, particularly the climate crisis itself.

In 1846, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton embodied White supremacy in his exclamation that “It would seem that the White race alone received the divine command, to subdue and replenish the earth: for it is the only race that has obeyed it — the only race that hunts out new and distant lands, and even a New World, to subdue and replenish….” (Congressional Globe, 29:1 (1846), 917).

Wait a second

As a hotheaded youth on the frontier Thomas Hart Benton (1782-1858) once fought a duel with Andrew Jackson, who carried Benton’s bullet in his body for the rest of his life. Neither man could have anticipated that after Jackson was elected president, Benton as a Missouri Democrat..

So, this whole climate crisis as part of white supremacy thing is actually caused by Democrats? Huh.

Read: Climate Crisis (scam) Is Driven By White Supremacy Or Something »

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

If All You See…

By William Teach September 24, 2020 – 1:00 pm

…is a wonderful bench for people to wait for the public transportation bus, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Never Yet Melted, with a post on karma for someone having a TDS meltdown.

Read: If All You See… »

Posted in If All You See | 7 Comments | Trackback URL

Vox Unintentionally Proves That Democrats Are Killing Our Democratic Republic

By William Teach September 24, 2020 – 10:23 am

This screed by Excitable Zach Beauchamp, one of the crazier folks at Vox, is an attempt to dunk on Republicans, but, hits Democrats right in the nads

RBG, the 2020 election, and the rolling crisis of American democracy

For much of this fall, Americans have fretted about a legitimacy crisis surrounding the 2020 election. But now, after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the hypocritical Republican rush to fill her seat in an election year, it’s clear that the crisis is here.

Liberal democracy only functions when major parties accept the right of their opponents to govern. The purpose of the system is to take the antagonism that defines politics everywhere and channel it, creating rules and establishing norms that prevent one segment of the population from crushing others’ ability to participate in and shape the system.

Democrats have been bleating about the legitimacy of the 2016 election even before it happened. They questioned the 2000 and 2004 elections because they lost. They’ve refused to accept the right of Trump and the Republican led Senate to govern. The purpose of the filibuster in the Senate is to keep the majority from running roughshod over the minority party, yet, they threaten to get rid of it.

The rest of the piece is an attempt to say “Republicans bad, Democrats good”, yet, Democrats still won’t accept the results of the 2016 election, won by the rules, and want to get rid of the Electoral College. To the ending

This is terra incognita. The fairness of our elections has come under fundamental question, as has the Court that’s supposed to provide legal redress in exactly this kind of dispute. There is no road map for what may lie ahead, and getting out of it will require a genuine reckoning with what got us here — that one of our major parties has spent decades convincing itself that its rival wielding power is an unacceptable catastrophe.

What this is really all about is delegitimizing the Supreme Court, particularly if Trump gets his next pick through before election day, and to set the stage to challenge the results if they lose, blaming Republicans and Trump for cheating. Sure sounds like they are very worried about Handsy Joe, eh?

Read: Vox Unintentionally Proves That Democrats Are Killing Our Democratic Republic »

Posted in Barking Moonbats, Democrats | 20 Comments | Trackback URL
Pirate's Cove