“The Obama administration has publicly admitted that the intent of the CPP (Clean Power Plan) is to ‘transform’ the generation of electricity in the United States — in the face of a statute that nowhere talks about granting such a power,” writes Francis Menton in the Manhattan Contrarian.
In over 300 pages of nearly incomprehensible regulatory newspeak, the CPP effectively requires closure of all or nearly all coal-fired power plants in the country, and their replacement with new facilities that must include large amounts of far-more-expensive and hugely unreliable “renewables” like wind and solar. Coal-fired power plants currently provide about 35% of all electricity in
the country, with high reliability and rock bottom cost. Some states (such as West Virginia) get nearly all their electricity from coal. The CPP, in defiance of basic principles of federalism, simply orders those states, against the will of their elected officials, to start imposing these enormous costs on their citizens. And, until the Supreme Court granted its stay, EPA would have required the states to comply on a schedule which could only be met if multi-billion dollar
decisions were made and funds committed before the legality of the rule could be tested in court.
The big question is, does the Clean Air Act, let alone the Constitution, give EPA authority to do what it has done?
… it’s clear that the courts are highly polarized on this one. The Supreme Court’s order granting the stay was 5 to 4, with the usual “conservatives” in favor and the usual “liberal” judges dissenting. It’s clear to me that the latter four are committed to the cause of “saving the planet,” and that to them that cause trumps any and
all other considerations like: whether the statute gives EPA this authority, whether EPA’s action is constitutional, how many billions this might cost, whether electric bills of the poor might be doubled or tripled, whether there is actually any evidence that increasing CO2 has warmed the atmosphere, whether even if CO2 is warming the atmosphere this rule would make any measurable difference, and anything else.
A lot of good things can happen to your personal security situation when you take some initiative. For example, what will it take for you to have a “choice” to carry a weapon legally? Having a choice may provide you and your family with a great deal of comfort.
As I’ve told you recently in Protect Your Family, Every Way Possible, I have my resident concealed carry license now in two states, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. With the two, I can legally carry in 33 states.
Take a look at the list I’ve provided for you, courtesy of handgunlaw.us, run your finger to your state, and see what it will take for you to be able to move freely about the country. You may be pleasantly surprised.
The Wall Street Journal explains to readers that Mr. Trump “isn’t soliciting campaign donations and has accused rivals of becoming ‘puppets’ of their wealthy donors,” which is exactly the case. And it is Marco Rubio, like Newt Gingrich in the last presidential cycle, whose name comes up most prominently when the name Sheldon Adelson arises.
The WSJ, quoting Rubio on Adelson: “We talk to him quite a bit on the phone and different things like that. … I won’t see him tonight or tomorrow, but we’ve got a longstanding relationship and friendship. And I am sure we’ll continue to communicate.”
Former CIA bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer explains to readers:
President Obama’s unilateral and so illegal decision to restart his and Mrs. Clinton’s personal and Africa-ruining war in Libya is a good reminder of what America lost with the death of Justice Scalia. Whether or not you agreed with Justice Scalia’s decisions, you could at least be confident that he was one of the three justices on the Supreme Court — the others being Justice
Alito and Justice Thomas — who knew what and why the Founders put what they did in the Constitution, and that they intended its clear language to be interpreted in a manner that did not read into the text things that are not there and that are meant to contribute to the building of a tyrannical national government.
The Founders also included a demanding amending formula which was intended to be the only tool with which the Constitution could be changed. Neither Obama, George W. Bush, nor Bill Clinton obeyed the Constitution in terms of securing an official congressional declaration of war for the almost entirely unnecessary wars they started or joined. Each should have been impeached for that offense
alone.
In regard to Judge Scalia’s replacement, the Republican leadership in the Congress was foolish to say it would not consider Obama’s nominee. Obama can now nominate another under-qualified Democratic political apparatchik as he did in the cases of Justices Kagan and Sotomayor. He will nominate a lawless, authoritarian like himself, one who is a woman, a minority, an LBGT person, a Black or
Latino, or some combination of those and the other slave-like, Constitution-hating groups that worship at the altar of Obama’s tyranny.
Trump was good last night, not great, but good enough to win the debate. To win the Republican nomination he needs 1,237 delegates. Trump will have a total of around 85 with the Nevada allocation. The Golden Four states of California, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey hold 389 delegates. Since 1980, the Republican front-runner has swept the Golden Four to win the nomination. Voting takes place later
in the season for the Golden Four (CA-June 6/NY-April 19/PA-April 26/NJ-June 7). If history holds true, then Trump’s magic number to hit, prior to the Golden Four contests, is 848 delegates. The Hill explains how he can do it here:
If he maintains this momentum throughout the first two weeks of March, he will have more delegates than any candidate could feasibly match going into the golden four states, guaranteeing him that frontrunner status that turns out late primary voters and transforms candidates into nominees.
The first two weeks of March present the ultimate test for any campaign, with 27 nominating contests and 1,309 possible delegates. An evaluation of recent polls, state demographics, and regional indicators, reveals that Trump is positioned to take 672 of those delegates with wins in 13 of the 27 states (Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Massachusetts, Vermont, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi,
Florida, Illinois, Missouri, and North Carolina). In six further states (Oklahoma, Tennessee, Virginia, Kansas, Kentucky, and Ohio) Trump retains slimmer polling advantages, marking these as “likely Trump” states, and providing him with a prospective 302 additional delegates. In five further states and territories (Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Idaho, Washington DC, and the Northern Mariana Islands) lack of up-to-date information makes accurately predicting the outcomes
impossible, leaving those 102 delegates effectively up for grabs. The remaining three states (Arkansas, Texas, and Minnesota) are divided between the rest of the pack, with Cruz polling in front in Texas and Arkansas, and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) narrowly edging Trump out in Minnesota.
However, as evidenced by the Iowa caucus, minor Trump leads in polls can still result in election night victories for his opponents, as the organizational capabilities of Trump’s campaign are some of the weakest in the field. Yet of the six “likely Trump” states and five states without sufficient information, Trump only needs a combined 81 delegates of the 405 in play. In
this scenario, Trump only needs to win two states between Virginia, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, all of which he holds comfortable polling leads in.
When prognosticating any number of scenarios, it seems that every possible outcome points to Trump. All indicators suggest that Trump will likely well surpass the 850 delegate benchmark within the next three weeks, setting up a straightforward conclusion to the race. With this comfortable of a lead, Trump is poised for victories in the golden four states, giving him enough delegates to clinch
the nomination. At some point we have to accept that no other candidate can reach the number of delegates that Trump has obtained. Gov. John Kasich (Ohio) and Rubio can celebrate second place finishes in New Hampshire and South Carolina respectively, while Trump takes his delegates and runs- all the way to the Republican nomination.
David Wasserman of the acclaimed Cook Political Report explains the power of Blue State Republicans here:
Spike Lee, Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, and Rep. Danny Davis (D., Ill.) have a problem with the Academy Awards. Their frustration is understandable in that not one black actor has not been nominated in the four major Oscar categories for the second year in row. But as this controversy plays out, Kay Cole James asks in
the WSJ if this is really the problem that needs to be resolved in the black community.
Within blocks of the theater are black teenagers who won’t receive the education they need to achieve a decent life, let alone step onto a red carpet. Nearly one out of every three black high-school students in California fails to graduate on time—or at all. According to the California Education Department, that’s more than 11,000 black students in 2013 alone.
The situation across the country is no less shocking. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s 2015 Report Card, black students are falling far behind their white, Latino and Asian classmates. Only 19% of black fourth-graders are proficient in math compared with 51% of white fourth-graders. Black students’ eighth-grade scores in math are 30 percentage points lower than
white students. When it comes to reading, only 18% of black fourth-graders are proficient compared with 46% of white fourth-graders, and the reading gap between black and white eighth-graders is 28 percentage points. The gap is just as big in science, history and geography.
… Is this the problem that our community really needs solved?
What really matters is that black children don’t need, and their futures don’t depend on, more Oscars, writes Ms. James. She argues that Mr. Lee and the Smiths would better serve the black community by focusing their considerable energy and clout on the educational system that is failing African-American children. “It’s academics, not the Academy, that really
matter.”
There is that famed “blue wall” those 18 states and D.C with a combined 242 electoral votes, just 28 shy of victory, that have gone Democrat in every presidential election since 1988. The wall contains all of New England save New Hampshire; the Acela corridor (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland); plus, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois in the Middle West; and the Pacific
coast of California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii.
Half the nation now receives government benefits—in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, student loans, rent subsidies, school lunches and Earned Income Tax Credits, etc.
How can Republicans have any shot against the combination of the “Blue Wall” and the Democrats’ mother’s milk menu outlined above?
Mr. Buchanan strikes to the obvious: “The turnout at Trump rallies has been unlike anything seen in presidential primaries; and what’s more, the GOP turnout in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada set new records for the party.”
The worst thing that could come of the Donald Trump candidacy may have already happened. Trump’s swashbuckling egomania, sadism, and demagoguery have led some to conclude that the other possible presidents are reasonable, humane people. Nothing could be further from
the truth. They’re all monsters.
To recap: Trump suggested that Mexico is deploying platoons of sexual predators across the U.S. border. He thinks we should figure out some way to stop letting Muslims into the United States until the country’s representatives can “figure out what the hell is going on.” (Seems unlikely no matter who wins the presidency.)
To the cheers of the crowd, Trump has taken his xenophobic low comedy routine to an even darker place, endorsing an apocryphal tactic attributed to Pershing in which Americans shot Muslim prisoners in the Philippines with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood in
order to send…some sort of message. He also enthused about the application of torture beyond waterboarding as a foreign policy instrument. And this is only the first page of the catalog of recent Trump offenses.
That said, the only way I would pull a lever for Donald Trump would be if he were standing on a trapdoor. But every other plausible president is dangerous as well, and unlike Trump, they would be able to govern. If Trump’s boorishness makes them look good, we’ve lost our grip on reality.
Start with his likely opponent, Hillary Clinton. Long a Progressive imperialist, Clinton ghoulishly channeled Julius Caesar in her encomium to the Libya war: “We came, we saw, he [Gaddhafi] died.” Gaddhafi was a thug, but still: that’s a heck of a
thing to say about a guy who died while being violently sodomized–extrajudicially, if you must know–by his captors. More broadly, one might mention that the Libyan war was both sold on false pretenses and turned the country into an ISIS-spawning charnel house.
Our presidential politics selects for certain
personality defects and weeds out the well-adjusted. And look on the bright side: In the unlikely event Trump were to win, the bureaucracies would resist his craziest edicts. There would be bombshell resignations of political appointees, if they could be found and confirmed to begin with. The Republican Party might be destroyed, and something less stupid might take its place.
One might even hope that impeachment, the great purifying fire provided for in the Constitution, would find its spark. And as Trump attempted to act on his crazy ideas, at least we wouldn’t have to suffer some dreary harpy or blue-suited drone assuring us that it’s all very responsible and adult. The absurdity of our politics would be in full, stark relief.
If you’re forced to vote for president, I say: vote no.
Today begins the first in a series of contributions from my friend Justin Logan, former Cato Institute director of foreign policy studies. I know Justin as an expert on U.S. grand strategy, international relations theory, and American foreign policy.
One of my favorite Foreign Policy studies was published for the Foreign Policy Research Institute by Elsevier in 2012. In this study, Justin and fellow Cato Institute scholar Benjamin H. Friedman wrote to readers on A Military Budget for an Insular Maritime Power.
The U.S. military could be far cheaper. As a rich state remote from trouble, the United States can afford a wait-and-see approach to distant threats, letting others bear the initial cost of meeting them. Abandoning the pretension that global trade depends on U.S protection would allow vast reductions in overseas missions and peace-time military expenditures. Avoiding the conflation of foreign disorder
with foreign threats would allow American leaders to plan for fewer occupational wars. Shedding these missions would allow the Pentagon to lose force structure—reducing the number of U.S military personnel, the weapons and vehicles procured for them, and operational costs. The resulting force would be more elite, less strained and far less expensive—it could be reduced in cost by a quarter to a third, leaving aside war costs.
More about Justin: Formerly the Cato Institute’s director of foreign policy studies, Logan writes primarily about politics and American foreign policy. He holds a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree in international relations from American University. He is an expert on U.S. grand strategy,
international relations theory, and American foreign policy. He has lectured on American strategy across the country and across the world, and his articles have appeared in International Security, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Foreign Policy, the National Interest, the Harvard International Review, Orbis, National Review, the American Conservative, Reason, Politico, and the American Prospect, among others. A native Missourian, Logan currently lives in Washington, DC with his wife and two
sons, where they are opening a Latin American wine and spirits bar, Ruta del Vino .
