One of the worst aspects of living in these apocalyptic times is that whenever you look around the world, wondering where you might escape to, you begin to realise that everywhere else is just as bad if not worse.In response, I give you the following (here)…
Take Australia, an island built on fossil fuel with an economy dependent on fossil fuel. What would be the maddest economic policy a place like that could pursue as the world tips deeper into recession? Why, to introduce a carbon tax, of course. Which, for reasons just explained above, means a tax on absobloodylutely everything. Which is exactly what Julia Gillard's Coalition (why is it that word always makes me want to reach for my Browning?) has just gone and done, obviously.
…
Here, for example, is its Chief Scientist Ian Chubb in action:
"With respect to this cooling stuff, I have seen the claim, but the evidence that I have seen is that the last decade has been the warmest decade that we have ever had on this planet, so I do not know what this cooling stuff means.”
Let's just run that one by you again, in case you thought you'd been overdoing the Cane toad juice. The man who came up with that scientifically inaccurate, historically ignorant, Greenpeace-like enviro-hysteria drivel is AUSTRALIA'S CHIEF SCIENTIST.
I have come to Australia to see what a global-warming future holds for this most vulnerable of nations, and Mother Nature has been happy to oblige: Over the course of just a few weeks, the continent has been hit by a record heat wave, a crippling drought, bush fires, floods that swamped an area the size of France and Germany combined, even a plague of locusts. "In many ways, it is a disaster of biblical proportions," Andrew Fraser, the Queensland state treasurer, told reporters. He was talking about the floods in his region, but the sense that Australia – which maintains one of the highest per-capita carbon footprints on the planet – has summoned up the wrath of the climate gods is everywhere. "Australia is the canary in the coal mine," says David Karoly, a top climate researcher at the University of Melbourne. "What is happening in Australia now is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the future."As noted here, Delingpole once said, "I feel a bit of an imposter talking about the science. I'm kind of -- I'm not a scientist, you may be aware. ... I leave the science stuff to you guys and I think it's good that we stick to our jobs."
As (Hurricane) Yasi bears down on the coast, the massive storm seems to embody the not-quite-conscious fears of Australians that their country may be doomed by global warming. This year's disasters, in fact, are only the latest installment in an ongoing series of climate-related crises. In 2009, wildfires in Australia torched more than a million acres and killed 173 people. The Murray-Darling Basin, which serves as the country's breadbasket, has suffered a dec¬ades-long drought, and what water is left is becoming increasingly salty and unusable, raising the question of whether Australia, long a major food exporter, will be able to feed itself in the coming dec¬ades. The oceans are getting warmer and more acidic, leading to the all-but-certain death of the Great Barrier Reef within 40 years. Homes along the Gold Coast are being swept away, koala bears face extinction in the wild, and farmers, their crops shriveled by drought, are shooting themselves in despair.
With Yasi approaching fast, disaster preparations are fully under way. At the airport, the Australian Defense Force is racing to load emergency supplies into Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters. Entire cities have shut down, their streets nearly empty as I drive north, toward the center of the storm, through sugar plantations and ranch land. Dead kangaroos sprawl by the side of the road, the victims of motorists fleeing the storm.
Which I suppose begs the following question: aside from being a bought-and-paid-for shill by the climate change denial industry, exactly what is Delingpole’s job anyway?
As failed solar panel manufacturer Solyndra rides through the investigative ringer in Congress, revelations of another politically-connected company that received what appears to be a less-than-virtuous $1.2 billion loan guarantee are surfacing.Still waiting to find out what the supposed “scandal” is here (and Boyle continues to stack the proverbial deck by reminding us how much of this is taxpayer-funded – it would be nice to see more of that concerning our monstrous defense budget)…
The company, SunPower, received its $1.2 billion loan guarantee in September, immediately before the program’s deadline.
SunPower isn’t as financially sound as the public was led to believe when it secured a loan guarantee twice the size of Solyndra’s $535 million loan. Just this week — less than a month after taxpayers landed on the hook for SunPower’s $1.2 billion loan guarantee — company executives announced that they expect to lower their 2011 earnings projections.
The company also carries $820 million in debt, which is $20 million more than its market capitalization.
“There is great cause for alarm over political influence contaminating the DOE loan guarantee program,” (Repug House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations chairman Rep. Cliff Stearns) told The Daily Caller. “The documents that the White House dumped last Friday reveal a disturbing prevalence of wealthy donors and bundlers littered throughout the loan guarantee process, with direct access to the President’s West Wing inner circle.”And how is that different exactly from Departments of Energy in prior administrations?
Stearns adds that, because “billions of taxpayers dollars are at stake” in the loan guarantee process, the committee has doubled down on information requests from Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
Last October, President Barack Obama’s Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and California Democratic Rep. George Miller toured SunPower’s plant in California. Both touted the company. Miller said SunPower was an example for “renewable energy” production and “America’s future economic growth.”Ummm…still looking for illegality here, people (and I think they are too).
But, Miller failed to mention how his son, George Miller IV, is SunPower’s top lobbyist in California. Miller’s son was pushing for the $1.2 billion loan guarantee taxpayers are on the hook for now. Miller is a powerful Democratic congressman, and currently serves as the ranking minority member of the House Education and Workforce Committee.
Less than a month after SunPower received the conditional commitment from the Obama administration, a French oil giant, Total S.A., bought majority ownership — 60 percent — of the company. SunPower investors backed the move. A Total S.A. executive told the New York Times the company believed in solar energy, and its move was an attempt to capitalize on it.Sooo…are we now supposed to prosecute every U.S. company that moves its operations to Mexico?
“We believe the winners in the solar industry will be fully integrated, financially solid, advanced technology and worldwide,” Total Gas & Power President Philippe Boisseau said. “SunPower has the technology. We already have some of the technology, but we’ve also got the market and the finance. It’s a full industrial combination.”
The Obama administration — which says it was continuing to vet SunPower after it granted the company a conditional commitment for the $1.2 billion loan guarantee — saw the company as promising and continued to move forward.
Then, right before the Obama administration signed the deal giving SunPower its $1.2 billion loan guarantee, SunPower and Total S.A. sold the project — which taxpayers are now responsible for — to NRG Energy, Inc. The loan guarantee still went through, despite the sudden pullout from Total S.A.
Mere weeks before finalizing the deal with the Department of Energy, SunPower announced it was opening a new facility in Mexicali, Mexico — instead of another one in the United States — in order to manufacture solar panels there too.
Oh, and Boyle throws in this little tidbit at the very end…
President George W. Bush’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission head Pat Wood II is a member of SunPower’s board of directors.In response, I give you this on Solyndra, which tells us that “the loan, which was originally pushed by the Bush administration, was 1.3% of the DOE portfolio.” We also learn the following…
The typical conservative-outlet story follows a template of Glenn-Beckian accusations that someone “connected to” Obama has “ties” to something. When you hear the phrasing “has ties to” you should understand this as code-speak for “has nothing to do with but can be made to appear to have some sinister involvement if you twist the wording a certain way.”But wait, there’s more…
FOX News has been promoting this “scandal” story heavily. (It should be noted here that Fox’s parent company News Corp’s 2nd-largest shareholder is oil billionaire Saudi Prince al-Waleed - an “oil interest” if ever there was one.)And for the grownup perspective on this, I would ask that you read the following (from here)…
Beginning in early 2009, the Obama administration's use of stimulus money under the Department of Energy's loan guarantee program went not just to help out a handful of businesses, but to jump-start a market. Funds doled out under the stimulus have gone, or are going to, a portfolio of renewables. The complete list of 32 "section 1705" (stimulus-funded) loan guarantees, available on the DOE website, is more than half solar -- it includes four solar manufacturing companies (including Solyndra) and 15 solar generation plants, along with assorted wind, geothermal, and biofuel businesses.But of course, as far as the wingnuts are concerned, why should they do anything to promote actual job growth in this country when there are cheap propaganda points to be scored against the Democrats?
Demand for solar panels rose, partially as a result of this and other government policies. United States solar firms achieved a positive trade flow of $1.9 billion in 2010, mostly on photovoltaic components. Of that, the United States imported $1.4 billion from China, and exported between $1.7 and $2 billion, says a solar industry report [PDF, p. 18].
China's reaction to that trade surplus? Since January 2011, the Chinese government has dumped $30 billion into support for its solar industry. China now dominates solar manufacturing, with 70 percent of the global solar-panel market, and, as Agence France-Presse reports, it is "almost solely focused on exports, with as much as 95 percent of production sold overseas, according to some estimates"...
The U.S. market responded to the flood of cheap solar panels: Solar is booming. The U.S. solar market doubled last year, and it’s expected to double again this year, even though many states are reducing their subsidies. How many other industries are growing that fast in this economy?
President Obama promises not to raise taxes on the bottom 98 percent. The Occupy-types celebrate the bottom 99 percent. Republicans promise not to raise taxes on the bottom 100 percent.As much as I’d like to expound on the idiocy of that lie, I will choose not to do so and only link here in response; the evidence presented to the contrary is damning enough.
Somebody in the Iranian government backed a planned terrorist attack in America’s back yard? No surprise there. Tehran didn’t earn a reputation as the world’s premier state sponsor of terrorism for nothing.Oh, ha ha, get it? “Inconvenient Truth,” the Al Gore movie – and Obama is a Democrat too. Big yuks…
Nor is it terribly shocking to hear that the plot was intended to be carried out on US soil. America these days must appear an open target for the likes of Iran.
This summer, President Obama revealed his new and improved strategy for combating terrorism. Pop quiz: What did it say about Iran? Almost nothing. Despite its record, Tehran merited just one mention in 19 pages.
This wasn’t an oversight. The White House didn’t forget to say something substantial about state-sponsored terrorism. It’s just that talking about states that foster and fund the slaughter of innocents is much too inconvenient a truth for the administration.
To begin, this tells us that former Bushco U.N. representative “Blow ‘Em Up” Bolton also blamed Obama for not attacking Iran, ignoring Bolton’s own “inconvenient truth” that Number 43 nixed such a disastrous enterprise also (Dubya didn’t get much right, but he “found the nut” on that one).
The post from Think Progress also tells us that Bolton’s old boss nixed the sale of “bunker busting” bombs to Israel, the type of which could be used against Iran (another good move, shockingly enough). Unfortunately, that supposed Iran-loving current White House occupant chose not to honor that precedent (here).
On top of that, I give you the following from here…
Something strange is happening in Washington. In August, the Obama administration is expected to announce whether it will keep the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an exiled Iranian group that killed American civilians and officials in the 1970s, on its foreign terrorist organisations (FTO) list.The al Jazeera post also tells us that “In 1979, the MEK also supported the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran.” And further…
Known for its cult-like behavior, the MEK (also known as the People's Mujahedin of Iran, PMOI or MKO) fought alongside Saddam Hussein's regime against its own country during the bloody Iran-Iraq war. This is one reason why it has almost no Iranian support, even if it refers to itself as the "most popular resistance group inside Iran" on its official website. It does, however, enjoy the backing of several US heavyweights with high national security credentials.
George W. Bush's attorney general Michael Mukasey has described MEK members as "courageous freedom fighters". President Barack Obama's former national security advisor, General James L. Jones, gave a speech at a MEK conference dominated by non-Iranians. Their events have also been attended by former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge, former NATO supreme commander Wesley Clark and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.
..in January, law professor David Cole wrote that Mukasey, Giuliani, (former DHS head Tom) Ridge and (former Bushie) Frances Fragos Townsend could have committed a crime simply by vocally supporting the MEK's cause in Paris. While proving liability is again the issue, the Patriot Act's material support law makes it a felony to support an FTO by engaging "in public advocacy to challenge a group's 'terrorist' designation or even to encourage peaceful avenues for redress of grievances," wrote Cole.(By the way, I don’t have an update at the moment on MEK’s status on the FTO list.)
…
MEK supporters' talk of facilitating "democratic change" in Iran through a group that does not have support there recalls memories of the UK-US engineered coup against the government of Mohammad Mossaddegh, who is still revered by Iranians as their first and only democratically-elected prime minister. What resulted was decades of authoritarian rule, from a pro-US but repressive and deeply unpopular monarchy, to a clerical establishment that enforces Iranian independence from foreign control through equally repressive means. This was the US' "blowback", and as the late Chalmers Johnson noted, the term was first used by the CIA in an after-action report about Mossaddegh's 1953 overthrow.
In her book on US-Iran relations, (US foreign policy analyst Barbara) Slavin reports that in 2003 the Iranians offered to exchange some key members of Al Qaeda who had fled from Afghanistan for members of the MEK based at Camp Ashraf in Iraq. Some figures in the Bush administration supported this, but Slavin notes that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said that the deal was blocked by neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, who thought that the MEK could be used as a force against Iran. A comprehensive peace offer by Iran was likewise scuttled by the neoconservatives in 2003, thereby discrediting the moderates in Iran and facilitating the ascent of the hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
So it looks like the MEK has been playing both sides of the aisle, as they say. And it also looks like, in the event that this country attempts military action for real against Iran (makes me hope that our supposed military geniuses brush up on the British Battle of Dunkirk in WWII), MEK would collect the spoils, all in the name of The Now And Forever You Godless Kenyan Marxist Socialist Lovin’ Commie Lu-bu-ruul Global War On Terra! Terra! Terra!
Oh, and by the way, as noted here, Carafano has never let facts get in the way of documenting his delusions, which you can probably attribute to an advanced case of Obama Derangement Syndrome.
And that makes me recall this particularly preposterous recent opinion column…
…The Washington Post officially hit rock bottom and removed all pretense of being an unbiased newspaper with a truly disgusting front-page story on Texas governor Rick Perry which worked overtime to paint him as a racist by twisting a series of clouded, unrelated, and anonymous partial memories about something which was flat-out totally unrelated to Perry. They sent a team of reporters (one hopes they are using as many reporters to investigate “Fast and Furious” and Solyndra) to Texas and then breathlessly “reported ” -- using over 3,200 words -- that there was a rock on some property once leased by the Perry family which had an offensive word written on it.I know most people know what I’m talking about here, so I won’t add anything else about that (besides, I have bigger issues with Perry than the name on a block in front of a ranch).
The Post acknowledges that the painted rock was there years before Rick Perry walked the land and that he had nothing to do with it being there. Governor Perry then stated that right after his family leased that parcel of land in the early 1980’s and as soon as they saw the rock with the offending word, that his father painted over it immediately.
To wit, I give you the following (here, in which the feds say Perry’s redistricting plan in TX is discriminatory, and a federal judge apparently agrees).
Also, as noted here…
Duane Buck is one of four men scheduled to die by lethal injection in Texas, where Perry is governor, over the next eight days – an exceptional rate even in this execution-happy state. At Buck's sentencing hearing, the jury that set his punishment was informed by a psychologist that black people had a higher rate of violent behaviour, a statement used by the prosecution as its key argument against giving him an alternative penalty of life imprisonment.Fortunately, Buck’s execution was halted (and this tells us about Vidor, TX, which had a reputation as a “sundown town,” as in, no blacks on the street after…). And here is still more information on racist names used across southeast Texas.
I don’t know if Rick Perry is a racist or not. Is Texas a racist state? I’ll let you, dear reader, be the judge (and I learned that we in our illustrious commonwealth don’t have room to throw stones about that from the 2008 presidential election).
Did the Washington Post play a game of “gotcha” with Perry on the whole “N-head rock” thing? Yeah, I guess, but as somebody said, politics ain’t beanbag (see John Kerry, 2004). And a supposed “liberal smear” doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the fact that Perry, due to his appalling lack of qualifications (to say nothing of the rest of that motley bunch), has no business campaigning for the most important job in the world.
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