Month: January 2013

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney: no carbon tax for you!

Via Hot Air Headlines comes this tacit admission that all of that stuff about global warming that Obama pontificated about at his last Inauguration?  Yeah, that was just what we call pillow talk, baby: “White House spokesman Jay Carney Jan. 23 deflated environmentalists’ hope of a major federal program to counter climate change, by declaring that the ‘we have no intention of proposing a carbon tax.'” Shocking, I know: truly, truly shocking… that Carney was being so uncharacteristically blunt and coherent.  I can only assume that he has the flu – it’s a bad year for it – and the drugs are making Jay Carney talk and act all funny.

Anyway, this part is particularly interesting:

“I think the President has long supported congressional action on climate change,” Carney said Jan. 22. But “he looks at [climate control] in a more holistic way, and he will move forward in implementing some of the [regulatory and spending] actions that he took in the first term,” he said.

Continue reading White House Press Secretary Jay Carney: no carbon tax for you!

Clearly the grade needs to be reviewed.

Interesting article on the 27th Amendment:

In 1982, while a sophomore majoring in economics at the University of Texas-Austin, [Gregory] Watson was looking for a paper topic for a government course; he discovered the unratified compensation amendment of 1789, which seemed to him to have abiding relevance. Watson confirmed the ratifications by Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Delaware, Vermont, and Virginia that occurred between 1789 and 1791, when the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution and the compensation amendment seemingly passed away. But Watson also discovered Ohio’s action on the amendment in 1873. He concluded that the 1789 amendment was still validly before the states principally because, unlike most recent proposed amendments, it has no internal time limit. Intrigued, he wrote a paper reporting and analyzing his discovery and urging that the amendment be adopted. But Watson received only a “C” from his instructor, who told him that the amendment was a dead letter and never would become part of the Constitution.

Oops.

Via The Volokh Conspiracy.

 

Why it matters whether Benghazi was terrorism or not.

You’ve no doubt seen this bit about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton losing control and snapping back at Senator Ron Johnson’s reasonable, if pointed, observation that the White House kept pushing out a fake narrative on the terrorist strike on, and murder of, our embassy staff in Libya:

Continue reading Why it matters whether Benghazi was terrorism or not.

“No Budget, No Pay” bill passes the House.

Basically, what’s going to happen is this: if the bill passes in the Senate then both the House and Senate will be under the gun to pass a budget in their respective chambers by April 15th.  If the Senate does not – and let’s be honest; it’s the Senate that’s the problem – then the Senate doesn’t get paid until they do.  The House Republican caucus was generally behind this bill (it’s linked to a three-month extension of the debt ceiling, which is the only reason why it might not have been); Senate Democrats are still kind of mumbling about it for the moment.

As to the vote itself… the House GOP forced enough Democrats to vote for it to allow for, simultaneously: the coveted ‘bipartisan’ label; AND to allow the hardline House Republican deficit hawks the luxury of voting their conscience on a ‘clean’ debt ceiling raise, no matter how high.  The Democrats really, really wanted to make this a party-line vote, but when push came to shove they didn’t quite dare to try to force their marginal-district House Members into line. In other words: tactically speaking, the GOP won this one, fair and square. Continue reading “No Budget, No Pay” bill passes the House.

QotD, Hope Is A Nice Thing To Have There, Sparky edition.

Yeah, good luck with that, pal:

[Third Way co-founder Jim] Kessler deemed [Barack Obama’s second Inaugural] speech more liberal, not for the issues addressed but for those largely omitted—namely efforts to grapple with the shaky finances of entitlement programs and to boost economic growth. While Mr. Obama made brief mention of Medicare and Medicaid, he offered little insight about how the country could afford to continue these programs.

“We’re hoping for something different out of the State of the Union,” Mr. Kessler said.

Continue reading QotD, Hope Is A Nice Thing To Have There, Sparky edition.

Ever hear of the digger wasp?

Fascinating critters, if admittedly an excellent source for nightmare fuel:

Wasps of the genus Sphex (commonly known as digger wasps) are cosmopolitan predators of the family Sphecidae that sting and paralyze prey insects. There are over 130 known digger wasp species. In preparation for egg laying, they construct a protected “nest” (some species dig nests in the ground, while others use pre-existing holes) and then stock it with captured insects. Typically, the prey are left alive, but paralyzed by wasp toxins. The wasps lay their eggs in the provisioned nest. When the wasp larvae hatch, they feed on the paralyzed insects.

Thank goodness that insects aren’t sentient, as far as we know: the thought of a free-willed, self-aware individual trapped and paralyzed, watching as something alien literally battened on its flesh – well, I’m not ashamed to say that the thought of such a thing gives me the chills.  Especially since it’s all done in the dark, where nobody can see. And what makes it truly horrific is that while the ‘host’ doesn’t know what’s happening to it, the observer does, adding a grim inevitability to the coming proxy anagnorisis… Continue reading Ever hear of the digger wasp?