I also found out that the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout – aka The Boat – has had all of the work it needed to make it seaworthy has been completed. That means we'll be able to ply the waters of the lake starting some time this coming week.
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You know it's gotten bad when a newspaper apologizes for publishing an accurate headline.The correct response the the BLM dupes who protested the headline should have been “Sod off, swampy!”
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“Obama has lost control of the Middle East.”It's not like he ever had it to begin with.
He pissed away years of progress paid for in blood and treasure for better poll numbers. That's not a leader. That's a narcissist with delusions of adequacy. Now we're paying the price for his abandonment of the Iraqis with more blood and more terror with more to come.
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Undoing 50 years of race relations because Obama can’t help himself.If there is no strife, no struggle, community organizers have no reason to exist. Race baiters like Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, and Barack Obama would be out of a job.
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David Starr offers a solution to getting rid of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the rest of the militant fundamentalist Islamic pinheads.As he writes, it “might be a little costly.” But it would probably be cheaper in the long run.
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Tom Bowler points us to a piece about Alan Greenspan and his warnings about the upcoming “crisis which has a way to go.”Greenspan admits part of the problem is the very policies he helped implement. One of the issues he says that will bring down our economy is the rapidly growing entitlement time bomb. The bill for all of those promises made by previous generations of movers and shakers in Washington will be coming due and we won't have the tax revenue to pay it. Projections show that in 2032 every penny of federal tax revenue will be needed to pay out on the entitlements. Raising taxes will only delay the inevitable briefly and will have detrimental effects on an already stressed economy, meaning the anticipated tax revenues will not be anywhere near what they are projected to be.
Of course I have to lay some of the blame on Richard Nixon as it was he who took the US off of the gold standard in 1971 and made our money nothing more than fiat, backed by nothing but promises and perceptions. (Note: FDR did the same thing in 1933 but it was only 'temporary', meaning it ended just before the end of World War II under the conditions of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944.)
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As per usual, the Massachusetts legislature is blindly considering a renewable energy source mandate that will have a number of unintended consequences, including much higher electricity rates in an region that already has higher than average rates and indirectly forcing the closure of two non-CO2 producing power plants – the Millstone nuclear power plant in Connecticut and the Seabrook nuclear plant in New Hampshire.One of the other side effects is that the demand for natural gas will skyrocket as base loads will have to be provided in some fashion and the over 2300 megawatts of base load capacity lost through closure of the two nuclear plants will have to be replaced by something, most likely natural gas dual-cycle plants. The problem? There isn't enough pipeline capacity to supply the amount of natural gas needed to run those plants (the local NIMBYs killed off the Kinder Morgan pipeline project through Massachusetts and New Hampshire) so it will need to come from Yemen on the huge LNG tankers at a premium cost rather than from domestic gas wells in Pennsylvania at a fraction of the cost.
The argument has been made that we'll be able to make use of Canadian hydropower, but there are two issues those making that argument are ignoring: access to that hydropower depends upon the building of the Northern Pass powerline project, something local NIMBYs are vehemently opposed to, and that the hydropower won't be cheap.
Either way, the mandate isn't a good or economic solution to a problem that really doesn't exist. It is merely yet another feel-good piece of legislation that will cause more harm than good.
But at least the legislators in Massachusetts will be able to use their support of the mandate as a means of virtue signaling. Too bad that a lot of ratepayers in New England will be paying through the nose to make them feel better.
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Gee, as if we haven't known this for a while!Eight Years After Hope And Change, Voters Are Angry, Anxious.
I remember watching Obama's first inauguration speech, figuring I'd give him a chance as it was quite possible he might do just fine. (I had voted for McCain and Palin). My hopes were dashed mere minutes into his speech when he attacked his predecessor's governance while George W. Bush was standing right behind him.
I knew then he was a classless boob, a narcissist (I knew that before the election but this confirmed it), close-minded, and likely to do a lot of damage to the country.
Time has proven me right, much to my and others' dismay.
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Anyone paying attention to what's been happening in the US over the past 80 years or so realizes that the basis of our nation, federalism, has been slowly diminished by presidents, congresses, or overweening bureaucrats who believe that only the US government can handle all our nation's needs.As federalism has declined, so has our government's responsiveness and accountability. Too often solutions to problems in one area of the country are mandated throughout the rest of the nation even though the solutions make no sense (or cause bigger problems) in areas which do not suffer the maladies being 'cured'. We've seen this with the EPA, a rogue government agency that believes itself beholden to no one and immune from the checks and balances. We've seen it with a host of other government agencies or departments like the ATF, the IRS, Justice, Commerce, and Department of the Interior. Our present president doesn't believe in those checks and balances either, handing down decrees by way of executive orders when Congress doesn't give him what he wants when he wants it. It doesn't even matter to him whether his decrees are constitutional, he issues them anyway.
The states suffer under this federal overreach, some times having to implement policies and regulations which make no sense because otherwise federal funds that are supposed to be 'no strings attached' will be withheld. Our political system has become corrupt, unresponsive, and abusive, all supposedly “for our own good.”
I have a feeling the breaking point is approaching, where the states will finally say “Enough!” and tell Washington DC to “Piss off!”
It can't come soon enough for me.
One possible solution to the problem is Senator Mike Lee's (R-UT) proposal that will require removal of an existing government regulation for every new one added. This will be accomplished through what is being called regulatory budgets.
Regulatory budgeting thus seeks to apply basic budgetary principles, such as prioritization and trade-offs, to the management of existing regulations and to the development of new regulations. Departments and agencies are given “regulatory budgets” based on the number of regulations, rules, and directives they issue, along with their estimated economic costs, and they are expected to live within them. Any new regulations must be offset by “savings” realized by eliminating existing regulatory requirements. The goal is to bring greater accountability, discipline, and transparency to the regulatory process.Works for me.
The United States increasingly is a nation of regulations rather than laws. The federal bureaucracy has become the de facto source of lawmaking, using vague and open-ended statutes to give itself seemingly unlimited powers to enact regulations, rules, and directives without congressional oversight. Federal bureaucrats have used the Clean Air Act alone to enact, on average, roughly 350 pages of regulations for every year the act has been in effect.But that is not all. The initiative also seeks to restore limits on executive action and promote Congress’s role in defending the public interest. Regulatory reform is at the heart of the effort to reclaim Article I of the U.S. Constitution.
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Is there nothing Hillary won't do or anyone she won't pander to just to get elected? From what I can see, the answer is a definitive “Yes”.In this instance, she's calling for a constitutional amendment that would reverse the Citizens United decision in order to “get big money out of politics.”
Of course I expect it's merely electoral rhetoric because she has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of big money to fund both her lifestyle and her campaign. If she is indeed elected, I expect that proposed amendment would die a quiet and lonely death...until she needs it again.
Such is the hypocrisy that is Hillary Clinton.
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After the terrorist attack in Nice, France, I wonder how long it will be before the Left in the US starts calling for the banning trucks. After all, the terrorist killed more people with his truck than he did with his guns.****************
Obama has left us more racially divided than ever.Yeah, he has, and it was done deliberately. He cries 'Racism' when he himself is the biggest racist in the room.
As Alinsky wrote, “Blame the opposition of the things you are doing.” Obama has followed that particular rule again and again since he became a community organizer. So what else is new?
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Who is more anti-science: Democrats or Republicans?To hear Democrats tell it Republicans are the anti-science party and they are pro-science. But it turns out that isn't even close to being true.
Members of each party have the science blind spots. One such blind spot is GMOs, genetically modified organisms. Republicans are split on the matter while ~75 percent of Democrats rate GMOs as unsafe despite more than decade of almost 2000 studies showing GMOs are safe for human consumption.
Climate science is another area where the two parties differ, with most Republicans being skeptical about AGW. On the other hand Democrats aren't particularly science minded when it comes to solutions to a problem that might not be a problem.
What it all boils down to is that members of both parties have problems with science, with the anti/pro-science attitudes being split evenly between them.