1) It’s Now Official – Joe Manchin Sold His Soul For NOTHING
Manchin’s sham oil permitting and gas pipelines that he assured the voters of West Virginia that he would get in exchange for selling his soul to Chuck Schumer and the climate change lobby is dead. Yesterday the pro-drilling provisions were removed from the year-end budget – probably never to see the light of day again.
It reminds us of the famous passage in a Man for All Seasons when Sir Thomas More learns that his colleague Richard Rich has betrayed him and committed perjury in exchange for being appointed the Attorney General of Wales. More turns to Rich and says:
“Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world – but for Wales!’
Manchin sold out West Virginia and didn’t even get a prize as small as that. We hope the voters of WV never, never forget – or forgive.
The teachers union tried to put a referendum on the ballot to block Arizona's historic expansion of Education Scholarship Accounts (up to $7,000 per child) to all of the state’s students.
Organizers claimed to have submitted 141,714 signatures. They needed 118,823 to qualify for the ballot.
There isn't an official signature count yet, but our friends at the Goldwater Institute did their own count and found a total of 88,866.
Which raises an obvious question: Why did they submit the petitions at all if they were 30,000 signatures short? Are teacher's unions that bad at math? The lead organizer is claiming plain incompetence:
Now there is a worry that Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a shill for the unions and a staunch opponent of school choice – hasn’t officially declared that there are insufficient signatures gathered. She may try to use some legal jujitsu to put the issue of the ballot anyway.
Oh. And did we tell you that Katie just happens to be the Democratic nominee for governor? It seems obvious to us – and hopefully to the voters of Arizona – that Hobbs has a legal and moral obligation to recuse herself from this whole issue.
What's really outrageous is that on the basis of a facially insufficient petition, Hobbs is presently subjecting 11,000 Arizona families to having their scholarships frozen while Hobbs waits to admit the petitions failed.
This is funny/ironic. But it is mostly heartbreaking.
This was supposed to be a triumphant conference celebrating how much Biden and the Democrats really, truly care about hunger. “This an incredible opportunity for us to discuss what the Biden administration is doing to address the issue” of putting food on the kitchen table a White House spokesman gushed.
Reality check:
Hunger and malnutrition in America and across the planet have been in rapid decline for the past 75 years - thanks to massive increases in agriculture productivity and big gains in worker incomes. Now we suddenly have a food and hunger crisis in America that is even more acute in poor nations.
Why? Because for bountiful food production farmers need cheap and abundant energy and they need fertilizer. The Biden administration and the Greens have declared war on both because of their climate change derangement. Energy prices in many parts of the world have doubled and tripled and the ban on fertilizers has driven farm yields into the ditch in many poor countries like Sri Lanka.
The best way to reduce hunger is to get Biden out of the White House.
At least the Biden and UN officials will eat well at this conference studying the hunger that THEY CAUSED.
We can't help but notice the striking similarity of this table constructed by our friend Paul Winfree at Heritage with our own previous analyses of lockdown severity. California now has a lower productivity rank than Georgia and Massachusetts now has a lower productivity rate than Montana. Winfree points out: "if California had acted more like Arizona, inflation wouldn’t be as bad as it is because higher productivity would have absorbed some of the government spending." And higher productivity would have also raised worker wages.
5) Climate Change Radicalism Is Colliding With “Not In My Back Yard” Environmental Lawsuits
Talk about cognitive dissonance. For the last forty years, the left has used every legal tactic known to man to stop economic development projects - from wastewater treatment plants to airports to pipelines and even hospitals and electric transmission lines.
But uh oh, now those tactics are being used against the Climate Change Industrial Complex. This excerpt from the Atlantic Magazine is worth reading because a) it shows the depths of the climate change derangement in calling for a whole new economic system in America and b) the frustration of the modern-day greens whose plans for a new world order are being disrupted by the very tools the left invented. The term that comes to mind is hoisted with one’s own petard:
Since the 1960s, fighting for the environment has frequently meant fighting against corporations. To curb pollution, activists have worked to thwart new oil drilling, coal-fired power plants, fracking for natural gas, and fuel pipelines. But today, Americans face a climate challenge that can’t be solved by just saying no again and again.
Decarbonizing the economy will require an unprecedented amount of new energy investment. Fossil-fuel infrastructure built over centuries needs to be replaced within the next few decades by clean-energy alternatives. The United States will need to build hundreds of thousands of square miles of wind and solar farms; deploy enough battery storage to keep power flowing through the grid even on calm, cloudy days; and at least double the country’s transmission-line capacity. And the same lawsthat environmental groups leveraged in the past to block or delay fossil-fuel projects are now being exploited by NIMBYs in ways that, however well intended, will slow the country’s transition to clean energy. Windmills off Cape Cod, a geothermal facility in Nevada, and what could have been the largest solar farm in America have all been blocked by an endless series of environmental reviews and lawsuits.
