CAPTION CONTEST: The Official Portrait of Richard Windsor, I mean Lisa Jackson, Which Only Cost You $40,000

Courtesy of Sean Hackbarth, who writes:

The EPA spent 40,000 of our tax dollars on this oil painting...


Begin...

Matt offers: "Thanks to Climosil, I feel fresher than ever."

BUT HE'S NOT BITTER: By conceding in 2000, Al Gore says he averted a "violent revolution"

Al Gore may have a gift for grift, but he is an exceedingly dimwitted individual when it comes to law and the Constitution.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV from the Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills, former Vice President Al Gore claims American democracy has been "hacked." Gore also opined on former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recently commenting that she regretted her decision in Bush v. Gore.

"[America] has been hacked. That is a computer term when the operating system of a computer is taken over and the computer does things the owner does not want it to. That is what has been happening to American democracy. You have 90% of the people in favor of background checks for gun purchases [sic] and the congress is incapable of doing what the American people want.

They have not been able to regulate these phony baloney financial derivatives that caused the financial crisis [sic]. They voted to invade Iraq even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Unfortunately there are a lot of examples. They can't pass a budget. I can't keep the country from facing financial danger and the main reason is simple, the influence of the money is at un-healthy levels..."

While addressing Bush v. Gore, the former Vice President said "there is no intermediate step between a final Supreme Court decision and a violent revolution."

"I did not know she was going to say it. I made the decision in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision 12 years ago, to respect the rule of law. I strongly disagreed with their opinion, said so, but the rule of law is the bedrock of American democracy. There is no intermediate step between a final Supreme Court decision and a violent revolution. what was best for the country, the answer was very simple, to respect the rule of law and avoid undermining it and dragging the court into a partisan squabble where the outcome would not change in any case. So I am going to stand by my decision to respect the judiciary," Gore said.

Violent Revolution? Pot-smoking hippies vs. Bible-thumping, gun-owning bitter clingers? Gee, who would I put my money on?

As Constitutional attorney Mark R. Levin has patiently explained -- repeatedly -- once Governor Jeb Bush certified the names of the electors, there was no way Al Gore could "win" the election. Not the Florida legislature, not the Florida Supreme Court, and not even the U.S. Supreme Court could change the Constitution's process.

Gore could have challenged the election of George W. Bush in court post facto, but only after Bush had won the election.


Hat tip: BadBlue News Service.

Old People Just Don't Get the 'Green' Thing [Papa B]

Papa B:

In the queue at the store, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment. The woman apologized to him and explained, "We didn't have the green thing back in my day."

The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment."

He was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry the clothes. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that old lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn't have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Papa B adds, "Remember: don't make old people mad. We don't like being old in the first place, so it doesn't take much to piss us off."


Related: How did we survive?.

Kim Snarkashian Award for Obliterating the Progressives' CO2 Scam

Over at the uber-serious science site Ace of Spades, we discover the following NASA disclosure:

There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days... Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008... Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87%).

It adds up to one inescapable conclusion: "We're experiencing a very deep solar minimum," says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center... "This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century," agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.

Clearly now is the time to regulate the economy through a carbon cap and trade system in an effort to offset, um something (freedom and prosperity mostly).


Now, does anyone notice in that graph Drew posted that sunspot activity is oddly congruent with late nineties warming followed by cooling throughout the 2000s? Look at this chart. Which does warming seem to track with more closely -- solar activity (or inactivity) or rising or falling CO2 ("The Invisible Assassin") levels?

I have to quote the commenter again who wrote this:

If only there were some... natural explanation for falling and rising temperatures. Such a hypothetical source of warming would have to be massive, however. On the order of magnitude of our own Sun.

And in Obama's presser, he just said if China's and India's citizens used same average amount of America's do, "we'd all be melting by now".

Sure we would. How dumb do you have to be to vote Democrat, anyhow?

That's a rhetorical question, of course.

Shock, Consternation: Chevy Volt Sales Plummet

The much ballyhooed "green" automobile -- ostensibly one of Barack Obama's success stories -- is, as any 16-year old male could have predicted, an abysmal and catastrophic failure.

The Chevy Volt has inarguably been the poster child for President Obama's push to electrify America's auto fleet. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent to produce and subsidize the plug-in electric car. For years we have heard about the supposedly amazing technology for the Volt which would lead America to energy independence, be a "game-changer" for General Motors and provide a multitude of new green jobs. Proclamations were made that supply for the wonder-car could not keep up with the demand. Well, March's sales figures are in and give further confirmation that the lofty claims were all lies.

March's sales for the Chevy Volt plunged over 35% from last year to a paltry 1,478 units. To put that in perspective, that's about one Volt sold every two months per dealership. The number is also down from an only slightly less paltry 1,626 sales in February. GM's excuses for the poor performance seem to be drying up as quickly as the demand for the Volt. During GM's sales conference call, management claimed that sales are "stable" and that they are "feeling good about the trend." Such dishonesty brings into question GM's credibility.

In the past, GM claimed that lack of supply was the reason for low Volt sales. In addition, GM indignantly blamed a Republican conspiracy to hurt Volt sales as a contributing factor to the dismal sales figures for the car. Regarding supply, a recent search on cars.com showed that 6,804 new Chevy Volts are available nationwide. That's about a five months supply...

GM and the Obama Administration have done what they can to prop up sales of the Volt and give the false appearance of success. Lease terms were manipulated to manufacture demand, as GM even admitted. Crony Corporation General Electric (supplier of charging stations) agreed to purchase 15,000 of the vehicles. Localities, and even the military, used taxpayer dollars to purchase Volts. And worst of all, wealthy buyers of the Volt receive a federal tax credit of $7,500 each to purchase (or lease) the vehicles.

So, now we have one more indicator that the Chevy Volt hype has all been a farce. Yet there is still no admission nor is there any accountability for the hoax that cost taxpayers billions of dollars. The lie lives on as few will criticize the politically-sensitive green failure. The Congressional Budget Office reported that electric vehicle subsidies will cost taxpayers about $7.5 billion over a few years for little benefit...

As the nation faces imminent bankruptcy, will anyone in legacy media report on this idiotic and utterly predictable failure? That's a rhetorical question: we don't have a real media any longer; we have an established Beltway pundit class, more interested in getting invited to the right cocktail parties than actually doing their job.

Which also describes the RINO establishment.

THE UTTER BRUTALITY OF THE SEQUESTER: EPA Outlawing Sales of Wood-Burning Stoves by Private Citizens

Because there's nothing to cut, don'tcha know?

Our ever so helpful government has decided that your wood burning stove is now a danger to the world. In another attempt to outlaw the off grid lifestyle, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the same agency that was recently caught using drones to spy on Americans, is now going after home owners who use Wood Burning Stoves to heat their homes.

Shortly after the re-election of President Obama, the agency announced new radical environmental regulations that threaten to effect people who live off the grid. The EPA’s new environmental regulations reduce the amount of airborne fine-particle matter from 15 micrograms to 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air.

This means that most wood burning stoves would now fall into a class that would deemed unacceptable under these new draconian measures. The EPA has even launched a nifty new website called "burn wise" to try to sway public opinion.

On their site, while trying to convince people to get rid of their old stoves and buy the new EPA-certified stoves, they state that these older stove must be scraped and cannot be resold...

The local air pollution agency says I can’t sell my old wood stove to help pay for an EPA-certified wood stove. Why is that?

Replacing an older stove with a cleaner-burning stove will not improve air quality if the older stove is reused somewhere else. For this reason, wood stove changeout programs usually require older stoves to be destroyed and recycled as scrap metal, or rendered inoperable.

Let’s hope this doesn’t fall under the jurisdiction of the newly created Department of Homeland Security Environmental Justice Units? The next thing you know we might all be getting a knock at the door….. Your Neighbor reported that you might be burning some wood, do you mind if we take a look around?

The federal government bureaucracies are completely out of control. You can't buy light bulbs, or shower heads, or toilet tanks, or automobiles, or baby strollers, or insecticide, or anything else without the unelected fourth branch of government having its say so.

Cutting 80 percent of the non-defense and intelligence bureaucracy would go a long way to healing some of our economic woes in this country.


Hat tip: BadBlue Prep.

"The Greatest Flood in World History": 100th anniversary of one of the nation's worst natural disasters

By Jeff Satterly and Robert Muhlhauser, HistoricNaturalDisasters.com

The week of March 21st through 26th marks the 100-year anniversary of one of the worst – and least talked-about - natural disasters in US history. During this week in 1913 a series of mighty storms tore through the Midwest, causing billions of dollars in damage and killing hundreds. From Nebraska to New York, and from Iowa to Louisiana, a large swath of the nation was hit by tornados, floods, rain, and snow.

First came the tornados which hit during the three day period of March 21st to the 23rd, 1913. Tearing through Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Nebraska, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, and Indiana, these storms killed over 240 people. The worst damage was done to Omaha, which had a tornado cut right through the middle of the city. The category F4 twister threw trees through houses and flung cars miles away. Once the storm had passed through the city, fires started to burn what little was left. In all, 115 people were killed and the city suffered over $8 million in damage ($187 million in today's dollars.


After the tornados had torn through the land, the rains came. Runoff from oversaturated watersheds like the Greater Miami in Ohio led to runoff which filled the rivers and streams of the Midwest until they began to overflow their banks. Levees, dams, and bridges snapped like twigs from the pressure of the raging waters. Cities and towns were swallowed whole by the flood waters.

Dayton, Ohio was the worst hit city of all, with over 14 square miles under water by March 26th. Some areas of the city simply vanished in up to 20 feet of water. The rushing waters tore houses and businesses from their foundations and took out miles of railroad tracks and bridges. The floods in Dayton ultimately caused 360 deaths and over $100 million in damage (over $2 billion in today’s dollars).


Peru, Indiana was another heavily flooded town during this week. The dam they constructed to prevent the flood waters from entering the city collapsed as soon as the waters hit it. Once the water started rushing into the streets the city was plunged into darkness as the electrical and gas plants were incapacitated by flooding. Once the citizens were rescued and deposited to one of two "islands" being used as refuge, many of them fell ill as diphtheria, measles, small pox, and mumps were all reported. 20 died in Peru from the flood, but many others died in the weeks after from these illnesses.

Cleanup efforts from the disasters took over a year in many cases, and the economies of cities like Dayton wouldn’t recover from the devastation for over a decade.


We’d like to thank some of the great archives and archivists who have done so much to work to help preserve the amazing history of the 1913 flood, including the Dayton Metro Library and historian Trudy Bell. The amount of history compiled at these two websites is truly amazing. Lastly, thanks to Jason from InsuranceTown.com, who lent us some of the resources we used to help prepare content for the web and publish our blog, and inspired our Mapping History Contest.

Don’t forget to check out HistoricNaturalDisasters.com for more images, and for information on our Mapping History Contest – help us figure out the locations pictured in historic photos from 1913 and you could win $100!

WARMAL COLDING: United Kingdom suffers longest winter in 50 years, deep freeze said responsible for 5,000 deaths

The chubby grifter Al "Gorezeera" Gore hardest hit.

[England] is on track to suffer its coldest March in more than 50 years as conservationists warned that the prolonged winter weather was damaging wildlife... The unrelenting cold weather is showing no signs of slowing this week as snow continues to fall across the North.


...Friday will see a return of heavier snow storms, which will spread further south to the Midlands. The Central England Temperature – covering an area bounded by Lancashire, Bristol and London – shows temperatures have been 2.8C lower than normal for the month.

The last time March was so cold was in 1962, when the average temperature was 2.4C (36F) – or 4.1C below the norm...

Every prediction made by the climate crooks has been wrong. They can't tell us what the weather will be on Wednesday, but they can predict what will happen to temperatures decades from now?

CHART: Despite federal government, oil production booming in ND

In spite of a radicalized, lawless EPA, North Dakota's oil production is fracking booming:

It's no secret that North Dakota has been in the middle of an oil boom since about 2008, but a new chart from the North Dakota Industrial Commission, Department of Mineral Resources, shows just how steep the increase has been...


...As of 2006, the state was only producing about 100,000 barrels of crude oil per day, putting it on par with other mid-tier oil producing states like Kansas, Colorado and Montana. But new hydraulic fracturing techniques and the opening of the massive Bakken formation to drilling changed all that, and as of January 2013 the state was producing an average of 770,000 barrels of crude per day, for a total of 23,834,000 barrels per month. That's double the amount the state was producing just two years ago.

It is a lot of oil, to be sure, but even with this recent explosion in production North Dakota is in just third place nationally. Texas produces a staggering 2,220,000 barrels per day, and the rigs that operate in the U.S. Federal Offshore region account for another 1,389,000 barrels per day. North Dakota currently accounts for about 10% of all U.S. crude production.

And virtually all of this production is occurring in spite of the federal government. In fact, in 2012 alone, "oil production on federal land decreased by 11 percent."

It would appear that the EPA is -- now that the election is over -- bound and determined to stop fracking at all costs.


Hat tip: BadBlue Financial News Network.

Advanced Levity Commences as Global Warming Con Game Implodes

Every. Single. Prediction. Every single one by the Climatards (which is the term they prefer, I hear) has turned out wrong, but none as spectacularly as this:

No, the world isn't getting warmer (as you may have noticed)... [and] official predictions of global climate warming have been catastrophically flawed ... the ‘scientific basis’ for [reshaping the] economy and spending billions in taxes and subsidies in order to cut emissions of greenhouse gases...

Steadily climbing orange and red bands on the graph show the computer predictions of world temperatures used by the official United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The estimates – given with 75 per cent and 95 per cent certainty – suggest only a five per cent chance of the real temperature falling outside both bands.

But when the latest official global temperature figures from the Met Office are placed over the predictions, they show how wrong the estimates have been, to the point of falling out of the ‘95 per cent’ band completely...

The graph shows in incontrovertible detail how the speed of global warming has been massively overestimated. Yet those forecasts have had a ruinous impact on the bills we pay, from heating to car fuel to huge sums paid by councils to reduce carbon emissions.

...Academics are revising their views after acknowledging the miscalculation. Last night Myles Allen, Oxford University’s Professor of Geosystem Science, said that until recently he believed the world might be on course for a catastrophic temperature rise of more than five degrees this century... But he now says: ‘The odds have come down,’ – adding that warming is likely to be significantly lower... Prof Allen says higher estimates are now ‘looking iffy’.

...The graph confirms there has been no statistically significant increase in the world’s average temperature... Its source is impeccable. The line showing world temperatures comes from the Met Office ‘HadCRUT4’ database, which contains readings from more than 30,000 measuring posts. This was added to the 75 and 95 per cent certainty bands to produce the graph by a group that amalgamates the work of 20 climate model centres working for the IPCC.

...In the Seventies, scientists and policymakers were just as concerned about a looming ‘ice age’ as they have been lately about global warming – as the Time magazine cover pictured here illustrates... Temperatures had been falling since the beginning of the Forties. Professors warned that the trend would continue and food crises were going to get worse because of shorter growing seasons.

Newsweek magazine reported that evidence of cooling was so strong ‘meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it’. But, it lamented, ‘scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections’. It said the planet was already ‘a sixth of the way towards the next ice age’.

While recently every kind of extreme weather event has been blamed on warming, in the Seventies the culprit was cooling. One article predicted ‘the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded’, along with ‘droughts, floods, extended dry spells and long freezes’...

The recent leak of the Climategate 3.0 emails offers additional evidence that global warming is about as genuine as a mother-in-law's hug.

Not that any evidence would dissuade the lawless extremists at the EPA.

SURPRISE! Democrats' Green Power Sources Will Crush the Budgets of Lower- and Middle-Class Families

I apologize for using the language of the left. America, of course, has no static class structure. Every day some of "the poor" become rich and some who are rich lose everything and become poor. But I digress: the point of this post is to highlight the effects of the Obama Democrats' green energy agenda.

In short, every form of power they advocate will be more expensive -- in some cases, five times more expensive -- than clean fossil fuels like natural gas.

The cost of generating electricity includes the capital cost, the financing charges, and the production or operating costs (including fuel and maintenance of the technology) at the point of connection to an electrical load or the electricity grid. When determining what new plant to build, a utility company will compare all these costs [i.e., "the levelized costs"] across the slate of available generating units...

...EIA provides an estimate for the levelized costs for each technology it represents in the National Energy Modeling System—the modeling system used to produce the forecasts for the Annual Energy Outlook. These estimates are provided here and in the graph below. The agency provides the costs for dispatchable technologies (such as coal and natural gas) and for non-dispatchable technologies (such as wind and solar) separately because they are not directly comparable...


...If the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining, a dispatchable technology must be available to supply the demand. Thus, non-dispatchable technologies supply energy, but not capacity since they cannot be counted on continually to meet demand...

...An example of this situation occurred recently in California when the state hit its highest demand at 5 pm, when wind was producing a mere 350 megawatts out of an installed wind capacity of 4.3 gigawatts (8.1% of installed capacity). Other technologies had to be called on to supply power at California’s peak load. Wind generation is generally the greatest during the night when demand for electricity is the lowest, so it does little for providing power when that power is most needed...

If the eco-tards are able to fulfill their mission of locking away Americas' vast treasure trove of energy -- estimated to last for centuries -- they will not only cause the price of power to skyrocket. Every good and service will see immense price spikes, from grocery stores to laundromats, as the Marxist left continues its war on capitalism.

GRAPH: 400,000 Years of Warmal Colding

In the extremely unlikely event that anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming is actually occurring, it may be rescuing us from another Ice Age:

...in terms of the geologic time scale, human history is the blink of an eye compared the 4.5 billion year age of the earth. The end of the last ice age, a monumental, undeniably non-anthropogenic warming event, happened about 12,000 years ago; to a geologist it may as well have happened a week ago last Thursday. Yet climate scientists rarely address the implications of that warming event on their modern-day warming theories.

But this week, a new study came out which alarmingly concludes that CO2-forced temperatures are at or near their Holocene (post ice age) maximum... data from the Vostok Ice Core ... affords a look at the last 400,000 years of earth history, encompassing several ice ages.

...The top graph shows CO2 concentration in the atmosphere; the bottom one shows average temperature departure from the 1950 value. Two observations are readily apparent:

• For the last 400,000 years at least, "normal" = "COLD!"

• The warm periods are but brief interludes between ice ages. Wild temperature fluctuations were common before any possible impact of human civilizations. The anomaly is the stability of the moderate temperatures during the Holocene, the last 12,000 years (indicated by my red arrow), when warm weather fostered the development of human agriculture, cultures and civilization.

Consider what a global ice age would mean. Cincinnati, OH and points north would be under a glacier hundreds of feet thick (not necessarily a bad thing, in the mind of some readers and SEC football fans). Agriculture would be impossible in North America. The planet could sustain a tiny fraction of its current population.

Given the writings of the more extreme Climatards (which is the term they prefer, I hear), eradication of the "Human Virus" is the goal.


Hat tip: BadBlue News Service.

STUNNING PHOTOS OF POLLUTION IN CHINA: Could Someone Let the EPA Know About This?

As the EPA tries to micro-manage industrial policy in the United States using unlawful and impossible dictates, the world's worst polluter goes unmentioned in the U.S.:

In China, public anger over secrecy on environment

When China's environment ministry told attorney Dong Zhengwei he couldn't have access to two-year old data about soil pollution because it was a "state secret", it added to mounting public outrage over the worsening environment.

...The environment has already been one of one of the most frequently raised issues at the annual parliament session and China's authoritarian government has admitted it has a problem... China does not usually allow public scrutiny of governance, particularly on sensitive issues such as corruption and security. But public anger over the environment may force authorities to accommodate the public in small ways...


...A choking smog in Beijing in January, far above hazardous levels, has been one of the most dramatic signs of China's environmental problems, but Dong is convinced that soil pollution is the country's "silent killer." ... Citing "state secrets", the environment ministry last month denied a request from Dong for information on data on soil samples that was collected in a national survey that started in 2006 and ended in 2010.

...And just last month, the government acknowledged for the first time that pollution had given rise to "cancer villages", admitting that cancer rates in villages near factories and polluted rivers were far higher than they should be.

In short, while the EPA tightens the screws on America's already clean industries using flatly unlawful tactics, America's policy-makers ignore the elephant in the atmosphere.

New technology could drive zero-emission, clean coal-powered cars; Richard Windsor hardest hit

I wonder what the overstuffed radical named "Richard Windsor" thinks of this innovation?

New technological advances may make it possible in the near future to engineer a coal-powered car so clean that it produces nearly no polluting emissions, including carbon dioxide...

“There are many exciting possibilities for the clean coal technology,” says Liang-Shih Fan, a chemical engineer and director of Ohio State University’s Clean Coal Research Laboratory. “We found a way to release the heat from coal without burning it. This could be applicable for many industries.”

Fan last week disclosed that he had discovered a way to get the energy out of coal without burning it, using iron-oxide pellets as an oxygen source, and contain the reaction in a small chamber from which pollutants cannot escape. The only waste product would be water and solid coal ash -- no greenhouse gases. As an added benefit, the metal from the iron-oxide is recyclable.

The energy creation process is commonly known as “oxidation,” and is the chemical combination of a substance with oxygen. The use of the process is envisioned by Fan and his colleagues as a replacement for old-fashioned coal power plants, which spew greenhouse gases.

If the technology can be successfully miniaturized enough to fit into cars, the fueling infrastructure needed to service them would not be all that difficult to develop, experts say.

My question, above, was rhetorical, of course. We know what "Richard Windsor" and her ilk think of anything that empowers the individual and freedom of movement: they despise it.

For these sixties-retread radicals, it's not about carbon dioxide, or pollution, or global warming, or climate change, or whatever they're calling their religion these days. It's about control over you, the individual. Restricting your movement, controlling the private sector, and setting industrial policy.

As Mark Levin often says, "Green is the new Red."


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

BUT THERE'S NOTHING TO CUT: EPA Spending Up 51% Since 2008

Please note that when the president talks about the horrific effects of the Sequester, he's describing a two (2) percent reduction in spending. That's right: two cents of every dollar.

In addition, please observe that he always paints the cuts in the most demagogic ways possible: autistic children will be beaten, orphans will be thrown into the gutter, baby seals will be left to the nefarious designs of Michael Moore, and poisonous, orange-colored water will flow from your taps.

Because there's nothing to cut.

Federal funding for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is up by more than half – in real dollars -- since 2008, according to calculations based on Treasury Department data.

In 2008, EPA funding was $7,938,000,000, according to the Final Monthly Treasury Statement for fiscal year 2008. That would be $8,464,894,460 in real 2012 dollars, according to the BLS calculator.

The same Treasury report said EPA funding climbed to $12,796,000,000 in fiscal year 2012. That’s a 51.1 percent funding increase from four years earlier.

I sent several requests for interviews to EPA administrator Richard Windsor, but she did not reply by our deadline.

Who needs the Keystone pipeline? Americans are only paying the highest portion of their paychecks for gas in 30 years!

ETF Daily News reports:

...if you exclude the 2008 spike in oil prices (to be fair, seemingly a unique anomaly and unsustained), Americans are paying the highest portion of paychecks toward gasoline prices in the past 3 decades. 30 years.

But Democrats are for the little guy!


Hat tip: BadBlue Money.

The Best Picture From Today's Blizzard

From the front lawn of a climatard, which I hear is the term they prefer:

Via: The Lid.

Smart Car: Driver killed after her micro-sized vehicle hits a... motorcycle

"Smart" isn't the brand name I'd use to describe a vehicle like this.

A woman who died in hospital after a collision between her car and a motorcycle in Surrey has been named as Freda Lawry.

The crash between the Smart car and the bike happened on 27 January on the A245 Byfleet Road in Cobham...

The motorcyclist, a man in his 30s, was taken to George's Hospital in Tooting, where he remains in a serious, but stable condition, Surrey Police said.

President Obama's mandate for vehicles to reach 54 miles-per-gallon over the next few years means that more people will needlessly die. And that's not me guessing, that's the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency.

In order for auto makers to hit the government imposed mileage standards new cars will have to lose weight. Strong metals like steel will be replaced with light weight metals or plastics. But while these cars of the future will get great gas mileage they will also have less bulk to protect drivers and passengers from injury or death in a crash.

...The NHTSA, Brookings Institution, Harvard School of Public Health, National Academy of Sciences and USA Today discovered a shocking reality. Even past and current mileage standards have resulted in thousands of additional fatalities, and tens of thousands of serious injuries, every year – above what would have happened if the government had not imposed those standards.

They also learned that drivers in lightweight cars were up to twelve times more likely to die in a crash – and far more likely to suffer serious injury and permanent disabilities.

Increasing mileage requirements by a whopping 19 mpg above current rules will make nearly all cars even less safe than they are today.

When President Obama says, in regards to gun control, "if we can only save one child," we know he's engaged in demagoguery.

Thousands die each year thanks to insane CAFE standards and Democrats could care less.

THE FUTURE OF OUR PROGRESSIVE UTOPIA: Wood-Burning Trucks

The Democrat Party's incessant drive to centralize more and more power in Washington, DC seems to have no limits.

Virtually every aspect of our lives is controlled within the Beltway, from the kinds of light-bulbs we can buy, the mileage our cars must get, how much electricity our washing machines can consume, and how much water can pass through our shower-heads. Worse yet, Democrats can't point to any blueprint that tells us when they'll be done centralizing power and authority.

If we need a model for where they're headed, it's got to be North Korea. All governmental power and industrial policy is centralized in one man. There are no separation of powers, there are no individual liberties, there are no checks and balances, and there's nothing protecting the individual from a lawless government.

Which leads me to this, the inevitable result of the EPA's warmal colding scam and its attendant war on oil:

...North Koreans [must] power their vehicles using gasifiers, which produce immense heat and break down biomatter, like wood, into a usable fuel. North Korea is just crawling with these mostly-wood-powered pickups and equipment haulers.

For decades, North Korea relied heavily on the USSR, China, and Iran to keep the cheap oil flowing. However, the USSR no longer exists, China seems increasingly displeased with North Korea’s behavior, and new sanctions have put the squeeze on Iranian crude. This has meant that many North Koreans must improvise when it comes to getting their old-school trucks moving. Wood is one of the few resources available in abundance in North Korea, and so it wasn’t long before the resourceful citizens (inspired by Dear Leader, of course) figured out that gasification was their only real solution.

Gasification has been around for a long, long time, first gaining widespread use after World War II. There are still people out there (and we do mean “out there”) who use gasifiers to power their rides, though it is far from an ideal situation as the burner must be feed a steady diet of wood in order to operate. They’re also loud, unreliable, and inefficient, but they work most of the time, and in North Korea, that is all that really matters

...It seems as though gasification will remain at the fringes of society for the foreseeable future, unless some worldwide calamity depletes our oil supplies overnight. Then all those wackjobs who predicted the end of the world might have something to celebrate, though one look at North Korea is a glimpse at just what such a world might look like.

And if the EPA has its way, gasifiers may be the only way to get around.

Like I said, the modern Left's endgame looks a lot like North Korea to me. Because the Democrat Party won't tell us when they'll have taxed enough, spent enough or regulated enough.

Which is precisely why you and I revere the Constitution and the strict limits it sets on government. And that is why the Left despises the Constitution; adherence to our nation's highest law prevents them from seizing all of the powers they desperately crave.

GEE, WHO COULDA PREDICTED IT? Sales of Electric Vehicles Collapse in January

Never mind that the United States sits on hundreds or thousands of years of fossil fuel supplies. Never mind that. The federal government wants you to drive electric cars. The problem is, you ain't buyin' em.

EV sales had shown minor signs of life in the last quarter of 2012, only to collapse sharply in January. “Sales of the Chevrolet Volt, the Toyota Prius Plug-In and Nissan Leaf each had deep dropoffs in January from December,” Reuters says.

“Even after accounting for the fact that January is one of the slowest months of the year for auto sales, the dropoff for plug-in electric cars was considerable,” Michelle Krebs of Edmunds told the wire. According to Krebs, consumers are opting instead for less-expensive standard hybrids, rather than plug-in electric cars. OEMS blame other factors, such as limited supply, model year changeovers, or changeovers from Japanese to U.S. production, as it is the case for the Nissan LEAF. GM says January sales were down for the Volt because people bought before the end of the year to gain the 2012 tax credit. Which may have been the power behind the last quarter rise of the still tiny segment...

Ain't central planning grand?

I mean, how many billions of dollars did this administration waste on electric cars and batteries when the technology just isn't ready? When the full history of the Obama green energy program is written (starting with Solyndra, Fisker, A123 Systems, Tesla, etc.), it will make the Teapot Dome Scandal look like a shoplifting incident.

Thanks to Chief Justice John Roberts' outrageous Obamacare decision, though, it would seem the federal government has the legal right to command you to buy electric vehicles. So we got that goin' for us.


Hat tip: BadBlue Car News.