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Before we get to the cap and trade, we’ll have a look at the Honduras flap where once again the kid president gets it wrong. Charles Krauthammer is first.
… Well, the president has a knack for getting all of these big decisions wrong. Two weeks ago, he refuses to meddle in a country where peaceful demonstrators are getting shot by a theocratic dictatorship. He doesn’t want to choose sides.
And now he’s eager to meddle on behalf of the president in Honduras who is a Chavez wannabe, who is strong-arming his way to a referendum—that has been declared illegal by his Supreme Court—as a way to…establish a constituent assembly which will establish a new constitution, which will be a Chavez-like dictatorship. …
And Peter Wehner in Contentions.
… Obama was clearly trying to pacify the theocratic leadership of the repressive, terror-sponsoring Iranian regime. In the case of Honduras, Obama is “meddling” in order to protect the legitimacy of an authoritarian president who is acting as if he were above the law, is violating Honduras’s Constitution, and is supported by Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and Fidel Castro (see this Wall Street Journal column for more). …
The passage Friday of the Cap and Trade bill was a low point in our history. We have many comments from some of our favorites.
John Steele Gordon comments on the Cap-and-Trade bill.
According to an infomercial masquerading as an AP news story, the “climate bill may spur energy revolution.” Overlooked by the AP and other minions of the left is the fact that the revolution has been underway, largely without the federal government’s help, for more than a generation now. In 1970 a one-percent increase in GDP meant a one-percent increase in oil consumption. Today its means less than a third of one percent increase in oil consumption. It would be considerably less than that had the left not brought the development and exploitation of nuclear power to a screeching halt thirty years ago…
Jennifer Rubin has some highlights from the House debate.
Minority Leader John Boehner, who under the rules for the vote had unlimited time to speak, decided to start reading the 300-page amendment that was added at 3 am into a bill already 1200 pages long. Few if any members had read, let alone located, the new bill on which they were voting. Politico described the scene which unfolded…
John Steele Gordon posts another piece on global warming.
Do climate scientists in general and liberal politicians to a man want global warming to be both real and anthropogenic in origin? You bet, because it’s in their self-interest for it to be so. After all, if it is, then both groups are greatly empowered by the necessity to do something about it. Only government–guided by experts–would be able to reverse a gathering climate catastrophe. The government would need vast new powers to do so. And as James Madison explained two centuries ago, “Men love power.”
Roger Simon’s liberal friends no longer want to discuss global warming. He comments on cap-and-trade.
Jim Lindgren in Volokh weighs in on Cap-and-Trade.
The cap-and-trade bill, if passed by the Senate and actually implemented over the next few decades, would do more damage to the country than any economic legislation passed in at least 100 years. It would eventually send most American manufacturing jobs overseas, reduce American competitiveness, and make Americans much poorer than they would have been without it.
The cap-and-trade bill will have little, if any, positive effect on the environment — in part because the countries that would take jobs from US industries tend to be bigger polluters. By making the US — and the world — poorer, it would probably reduce the world’s ability to develop technologies that might solve its environmental problems in the future.
Lindgren also highlights a quote from blogger Maxed Out Mama regarding the House passing Cap-and-Trade.
This is the most bizarre thing I have ever seen in my lifetime.
Let’s hope it can be stopped in the Senate. Even if it is, our nation has lost something here, and that something is the principal legislative body’s grasp on reality. It is as if the House of Representatives suddenly passed a vote to reduce gravity by 10 percent in order to lessen the costs of obesity to putatively cut Medicare costs in the future. Truly amazing.
Michael Barone analyzes the cap and trade votes and speculates on Senate passage.
… This bill was passed by the votes of one-third of the nation—the Northeast (New England, NY, NJ, DE, MD) and the Pacific coast (CA, OR, WA, HI), as the following table shows. Just over half the votes cast for it came from those two regions.
UNITED STATES 219 212
Northeast & Pacific 110 31
Rest of US 109 181
To oversimplify just a bit, the one-third of the nation that doesn’t depend on coal for its electricity passed this over the less unanimous opposition of the two-thirds of the nation that does. This was true despite Democrats’ gains in House seats in the rest of the nation in 2006 and 2008. Seven of the 8 Republicans who voted for the bill came from the Northeast & Pacific; 39 of the 44 of the Democrats who voted against it came from the rest of the nation. By the way, despite the opposition of Greenpeace and some other environmental restriction groups, only 3 of the Democrats who voted against this seem to have done so for similar reasons: Peter DeFazio (OR 4), Dennis Kucinich (OH 10) and Pete Stark (CA 9). Only three members did not vote on the bill, Jeff Flake (AZ 6), Alcee Hastings (FL 23), and John Sullivan (OK 1). Nancy Pelosi made an exception to the usual custom that the speaker does not vote by casting an aye vote, indicating the importance she attached to the measure. …
Ed Morrissey points out that the president refused to limit his family’s healthcare needs to Obamacare.
Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist and researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center, said that elites often propose health care solutions that limit options for the general public, secure in the knowledge that if they or their loves ones get sick, they will be able to afford the best care available, even if it’s not provided by insurance.
Devinsky asked the president pointedly if he would be willing to promise that he wouldn’t seek such extraordinary help for his wife or daughters if they became sick and the public plan he’s proposing limited the tests or treatment they can get.
The president refused to make such a pledge, though he allowed that if “it’s my family member, if it’s my wife, if it’s my children, if it’s my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.["]
The Economist has an interesting article. There is evidence that ancient people stored grain one thousand years before agrarian society is dated to have developed.
THE period when humans stopped hunting and gathering and settled down to become farmers is one of the most important in history. It ranks with the original human exodus from Africa about 60,000 years ago, which led to Homo sapiens becoming a global species, and the beginning of the industrial revolution, 250 years ago, when many people stopped being farmers and began to earn their livings in other ways. Yet it is not well understood. A piece of research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, and Bill Finlayson of the Council for British Research in the Levant, may shed more light on the matter. …