Alookinside“progressivecomedy”atNetrootsNation

A look inside “progressive comedy” at Netroots Nation 2014

posted at 12:31 pm on July 20, 2014 by Jazz Shaw

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This year’s edition of Netroots Nation (the supposed liberal answer to CPAC) kicked off this week, in case you hadn’t heard. (And judging by the massive lack of media coverage, you might not have.) To be honest, I have not idea what was going on at the various panels and speeches, aside from the apparently well received socialist stemwinder from Elizabeth Warren. But there was, it seems, one get together which was a real hoot, whether intentionally or not. It was a seminar called (wait for it) … Only the Jester Speaks the Truth and it was all about the importance of liberal comedy and why they need to be funnier than conservatives. A brief taste of the description.

The Left is supposed to be funnier than the Right, damn it.

So why do we so often sound in public like we’re stiltedly reading from a non-profit grant proposal?

This panel hopes to explore humor’s unparalleled ability to deliver challenging information to the public, as well as mold and shift perspectives.

Wow. That’s hilarious. I’m nearly doubled over with laughter already. But for those of us who were unable to make it, Jon Gabriel (better known as @exjon on the Twitterz) infiltrated the hive mind and brought us a report on this important progressive comedy summit.

This defensive tone was apparent throughout the hour-plus session, brought up repeatedly by speakers and audience members. Much like a co-worker who doesn’t get anyone’s jokes but insists, “I have a great sense of humor!”

After futzing with computers for 10 minutes, the panel’s four comedians showed highlight reels, with one apologizing for the lack of audience laughs. (Her show was made for the web, you see, so it doesn’t have cues for laughter like television does.)

The crowd was most pleased with Russia Today’s Lee Camp, whose video mocked America’s regressive attitude on gays and oil drilling without noting he gets his paychecks from Vladimir Putin.

“Comedy creates oneness and that is what our side wants,” according to Julianna Forlano, host of a news parody without laughter cues called “Absurdity Today.” She noted how her stand-up performance even created “oneness” at a Pennsylvania Elks Lodge, despite the crowd being filled with racist men (you could tell they were racist from the animal heads displayed on the walls).

Jon’s full coverage is brilliant satire and could almost make you wish you’d been there for the uncomfortable, awkward silence filled spectacle. (Well, I did say “almost”) But I’ll offer up this question for your weekend consideration. Are conservative comics really more funny than blatantly liberal ones? And if so, are they really more funny in an objective way or is it just that we agree more with the points they’re making? Ron White is probably about the funniest comic I can think of who is working today, and he’s definitely conservative. But a couple of his partners – such as Larry the Cable Guy – really don’t do that much for me. But by the same token, I find Chris Hardwick (also known as the Nerdist) to be hilarious in most of his work, but if you listen to his podcast, he’s probably about as liberal as they come.

In the end, I think comedy is in the eye of the beholder. A really talented, funny comic can deliver the goods no matter the ideological bent of their material. Of course, the easiest route is probably to avoid political comedy in the first place. Jim Gaffigan is a great example of that. I’m sure you can think of others.

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Tags: comedy, humor, liberals, netroots nation, progressives

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Geneticallymodifiedsuperbananasmightendupsaving

Genetically modified super bananas might end up saving millions of lives

posted at 8:01 pm on June 16, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

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Amazing. Via AFP:

A super-enriched banana genetically engineered to improve the lives of millions of people in Africa will soon have its first human trial, which will test its effect on vitamin A levels, Australian researchers said Monday.

The project plans to have the special banana varieties — enriched with alpha and beta carotene which the body converts to vitamin A — growing in Uganda by 2020. …

“Good science can make a massive difference here by enriching staple crops such as Ugandan bananas with pro-vitamin A and providing poor and subsistence-farming populations with nutritionally rewarding food,” said project leader Professor James Dale. …

“The consequences of vitamin A deficiency are dire with 650,000-700,000 children world-wide dying … each year and at least another 300,000 going blind,” he said.

The new bananas are on their way to the U.S. for trials that scientists hope to begin soon, and if everything checks out, the same biotechnology might eventually be deployed in other countries, too. Rwanda, parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Tanzania, and others stand to benefit from a more nutritionally substantive food staple — if, that is, anti-GMO and apparently sociopathic activists don’t unnecessarily insert themselves into the debate again, like they did with genetically enhanced golden rice. Via the Scientific American last March:

By 2002, Golden Rice was technically ready to go. Animal testing had found no health risks. Syngenta, which had figured out how to insert the Vitamin A–producing gene from carrots into rice, had handed all financial interests over to a non-profit organization, so there would be no resistance to the life-saving technology from GMO opponents who resist genetic modification because big biotech companies profit from it. Except for the regulatory approval process, Golden Rice was ready to start saving millions of lives and preventing tens of millions of cases of blindness in people around the world who suffer from Vitamin A deficiency.

It’s still not in use anywhere, however, because of the opposition to GM technology. Now two agricultural economists, one from the Technical University of Munich, the other from the University of California, Berkeley, have quantified the price of that opposition, in human health, and the numbers are truly frightening.

Their study, published in the journal Environment and Development Economics, estimates that the delayed application of Golden Rice in India alone has cost 1,424,000 life years since 2002. That odd sounding metric – not just lives but ‘life years’ – accounts not only for those who died, but also for the blindness and other health disabilities that Vitamin A deficiency causes. The majority of those who went blind or died because they did not have access to Golden Rice were children.

Basically, these nutjobs whipped up a bunch of phantom fears about the infinitesimally possible long-term health effects of GMOs, with the direct result that millions of children around the world were denied the relatively simple means of preventing fatal nutritional deficiencies. Pat yourselves on the back, guys.

The really painfully hypocritical part of this, however, is that a lot of the whispered fears on which these crazed activists have based their opposition are a sentiment on which Big Businesses has actively capitalized. You know, the sort of corporate influence that these committed leftists claim to abhor? Let’s call it the Organic/Anti-GMO Industrial Complex, courtesy of this new study:

However, according to a damning report issued by the organization Academics Review, the rapidly growing organic food market is built upon a foundation of lies.

The report states, in no uncertain terms, that the organic food industry conspired to deceive the public about the safety of conventionally grown food. By raising doubts over the scientific consensus on pesticides, hormones, and GMOs, organic food marketers deliberately played on people’s fears in order to expand the industry. One company, Organic Valley, even goes so far as to distribute activity books and promotional materials to schoolchildren that tout the alleged health benefits of organic food, indoctrinating a new generation of consumers. Parents are urged to lobby schools to serve organic-only meals.

Unsurprisingly, the authors, University of Illinois nutritional scientist Bruce M. Chassy and University of Melbourne food scientist David Tribe, conclude that “food safety and health concerns are the primary drivers of consumer organic purchasing.”

I really have zero issues with the organic food market, or with whatever personal choices people want to make in regard to the food they put in their bodies — but I do have a problem when people actively interfere with the opportunities that other people might have to make those same personal choices. Perhaps the even more painfully hypocritical part of this debate is that agricultural biotechnology really should be a self-proclaimed environmentalist’s dream; organic farming actually isn’t “sustainable” in any sense of the word, and GMOs have endless potential to create more nutritious food, on smaller areas of land, using fewer resources and pesticides, with greater resilience to climate change. Beat that.

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Tags: activists, climate change, disease, food, GMO, hunger, progressives

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NYCCounciltoWalmart:Stopsendingyour“dangerous

NYC Council to Walmart: Stop sending your “dangerous dollars” to our city’s charities

posted at 7:21 pm on June 4, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

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I don’t even know what to say. Via the New York Post (hat tip to NRO), more than half of the members of the New York City Council have served Walmart with a letter demanding that the company stop making millions of dollars in charitable donations to local groups:

Twenty-six of the 51 members of the Council charged in the letter that the world’s biggest retailer’s support of local causes is a cynical ploy to enter the market here.

“We know how desperate you are to find a foothold in New York City to buy influence and support here,” says the letter, obtained by The Post and addressed to Walmart and the Walton Family Foundation.

“Stop spending your dangerous dollars in our city,” the testy letter demands. “That’s right: this is a cease-and-desist letter.”

Last week, Walmart announced that it distributed $3 million last year to charities here, including $1 million to the New York Women’s Foundation, which offers job training, and $30,000 to Bailey House, which distributes groceries to low-income residents.

Well. How very spiteful and heinously out-of-touch of them. Here’s Neil Cavuto interviewing dancing circles around New York City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer in defense of the letter this afternoon:

BRAMER: Walmart has a history of abusing its workers and profiting on the backs of hardworking men and women. … I think that where the [charitable donations] come from and where the money has been accumulated matters.  …

CAVUTO: If you are a New York City resident and you’re paying through the nose for everything from milk and coffee to bread to drugs, what’s wrong with a big-box retailer like Walmart coming in and offering you $4 prescription drugs, offering consumers in this city who could surely use a break, a break?

BRAMER: I don’t think you have to choose between having a retailer that offers competitive prices for its good and a retailer that treats its workers well. … When Walmart comes into a city, they take more than they give.

CAVUTO: Do you know how many people apply for the roughly 200 positions that the typical Walmart offers? 8,000. 8,000.

BRAMER: It doesn’t mean that those are good jobs.

OK, so… prohibiting whatever your definition of “bad jobs” happens to be (and those 8,000 average applicants apparently disagree), is better than not offering those jobs at all? Not to mention offering gobs of savings in consumer goods to low-income city residents? And who cares if Walmart is trying is indeed trying to spread some goodwill with some of the city’s movers and shakers? Let ‘em! The unions shutting out the competition of free market for their own entirely selfish ends will keep fighting back just as hard.

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Tags: Big Labor, charity, economy, jobs, New York City, progressives, Walmart

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Theywentthere:Seattlejustenacteda$15/hour

They went there: Seattle just enacted a $15/hour minimum wage

posted at 8:41 pm on June 2, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

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Last week, Michigan became the latest of a handful of states to officially raise its minimum wage this year, with a gradual four-year phase-in that will take its floor from $7.40 up to $9.25 an hour — but over in the city of Seattle, things just got real. Say hello to what will soon become the highest minimum wage in the nation, via the AP:

The issue has dominated politics in the liberal municipality for months. Mayor Ed Murray, who was elected last year, had promised in his campaign to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. A newly elected socialist City Council member had pushed the idea as well.

“This legislation sends a message heard around the world: Seattle wants to stop the race to the bottom in wages and that we deplore the growth in income inequality and the widening gap between the rich and the poor,” Councilmember Tom Rasmussen said.

The measure, which would take effect on April 1, 2015, includes a phase-in of the wage increase over several years, with a slower process for small businesses. The plan gives businesses with more than 500 employees nationally at least three years to phase in the increase. Those providing health insurance will have four years to complete the move. Smaller organizations will be given seven years.

The plan includes a phase-in of the wage increase over several years, with a slower process for small businesses. The plan gives businesses with more than 500 employees nationally at least three years to phase in the increase. Those providing health insurance will have four years to complete the move. Smaller organizations will be given seven years.

Well. Their purported goal might be to “stop the race the bottom” when it comes to income inequality, but what they’re really doing is hastening it, as Seattle may soon see. The full phase-in is going to be gradual (which I really don’t understand, by the way, if part of these progressives’ sincere theory is that these companies have this money in profits and executive pay to throw around anyway), but most businesses will have to hike their minimum wages from the already highest-in-the-nation $9.32 to $11/hour by next year. Seattle’s is going to become the highest minimum wage by a long shot, even if national Democrats somehow do end up getting the arbitrary, job-killing, and ludicrously one-size-does-NOT-fit-all minimum wage of “$10.10″ on which many of them are sure to campaign.

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Tags: economy, jobs, minimum wage, progressives, Seattle, Washington

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Video:NewYorkNBCaffiliatenotesthat“assault

Video: New York NBC affiliate notes that “assault rifles only look different” after the SAFE Act

posted at 6:41 pm on May 8, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

No kidding. Via NBC4 New York:

Now some critics say one part of the law – the assault rifle ban – is not effective because new models being made to comply with the law are almost entirely the same as those that were banned. …

Under the law, bayonet mounts, flash suppressors and telescoping stocks are banned, and rifles cannot have a pistol grip. …

NYU law professor James Jacobs, who has written extensively on gun control issues, praises portions of the SAFE Act, including expanded background checks.

But he says the the assault rifle ban has resulted in a remodeled gun that is no less dangerous – just less scary looking.

New York hurriedly enacted the SAFE Act in January 2013, a month after the Sandy Hook massacre, and its many provisions — several of which range from pointlessly restrictive to administratively unworkable — have been going into effect over the past fifteen months. The purely cosmetic designation of what is or is not an “assault weapon” might be the most unproductive measure out of all of them, but the gun-control activists are still stickin’ to their guns, so to speak:

“The legal gun looks a lot like the illegal gun,” said Leah Gunn Barrett, the executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence. “Does that make this law essentially cosmetic? No. These features all have specific functions.” …

“The gun is still lethal,” Gunn Barrett said. “Yes, it can still kill people. But it is not as easy to manipulate and fire accurately than it would be if you had a forward-leaning pistol grip.”

…Weak. As Charles C.W. Cooke points out at NRO, the only thing that making AR-15s slightly less easy to manipulate accomplishes is making it slightly harder for less robust individuals to use them (like, say, women?) while having absolutely zero effect on their lethality — all of which is practically a moot point anyway, since the vast, vast majority of gun crimes and murders in this country are committed with handguns. This is purely a “feel good” feature of the law, plain and simple.

Anyhow. In somewhat better news, the attorneys general of 22 states just filed an amicus brief in the lawsuit looking to overturn the New York Safe Act, claiming that the law is unconstitutional. Via the WFB:

Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange filed the brief in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals as part of the lawsuit Nojay v. Cuomo, which was filed by individual gun owners and organizations challenging New York’s gun ban. …

Alabama’s attorney general, the lead author of the bipartisan brief, was joined by attorneys general from Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. …

“Because New York’s law amounts to a categorical ban of firearms commonly used for lawful purposes by law-abiding citizens, this court should subject the law to strict scrutiny under its tiers of scrutiny framework,” the brief states.

Tags: assault weapon, gun control, guns, New York, progressives, Second Amendment

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Seattleisprobablygoingtoenacta$15/hour

Seattle is probably going to enact a $15/hour minimum wage

posted at 8:41 am on May 2, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Last November, Seattle elected a straight-up socialist to their City Council who, among other economic/social-justice aspirations, included the already popular idea of a minimum wage hike to $15/hour in her campaign platform. Evidently, the fact that that is now very likely going to happen in a gradual phase-in over the next few years isn’t quite good enough for her, via the NYT:

Mayor Ed Murray presented on Thursday what he described as an imperfect but workable plan to increase the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, more than twice the federal minimum wage and one of the highest anywhere in the nation, through a series of complex and phased-in stages. Just as crucially, he said, the plan has broad political support, with a coalition of labor and business groups ready to push hard for it at the City Council, starting with the first hearings next week.

But the plan, which in many other cities might be seen as a liberal Democratic agenda at the frontier of social and economic engineering, was immediately attacked not from the mayor’s right, but from his left.

Kshama Sawant, a Socialist Alternative Party member who was elected to the Seattle City Council last year on a single-minded drive to raise wages, said the plan had been “watered down” by business interests on the mayor’s 24-member committee on income inequality, of which she was also a member. In a packed news conference at City Hall right after Mr. Murray’s, she called on her supporters to continue their effort to gather signatures for a possible ballot initiative on wages this fall. The campaign might also put pressure on the Council to make the mayor’s plan better for workers, she suggested. “Every year of a phase-in means yet another year in poverty for a worker,” Ms. Sawant said. “Our work is far from done.”

A handy 21 of the city’s 24 council members are on board with the plan, which designates that large Seattle-based employers (with 500+ employees, no matter where those employees are in the country) start paying the $15/hour rate as soon as 2017 with smaller businesses phasing in by 2021 — and all this despite the fact that Washington already has the highest minimum wage in the country:

Washington is home to the nation’s highest state minimum wage, at $9.32 an hour. As of April 8, 38 states had considered minimum wage bills in 2014, with 34 of them considering increases, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Minnesota and West Virginia have passed increases. Hawaii is expected to join that list after legislators approved a future hike Tuesday to $10.10, the level President Obama has pushed for nationwide. Workers in several states will see minimum wages of at least $10 in several states within a few years.

States and cities have led the charge as federal legislation has languished. San Francisco started the year with a $10.74 minimum wage, while Sante Fe’s hit $10.66 on March 1. A $15 minimum wage went into effect for some workers on Jan. 1 in SeaTac, the small city that is home to Seattle–Tacoma International Airport.

I might add that, while a “coalition of business and labor groups are ready to push hard” for the hike, there are other groups equally ready to push hard against it:

Seattle’s push to become the first big U.S. city with a $15-an-hour minimum wage has hit a snag: opposition from waiters and bartenders. …

“People are talking about moving to a European system of tipping,” says Maloney, 28, meaning less automatic and not as generous. She has become a spokeswoman for a group called Tips Are Wages, appearing in the Seattle Times, KIRO Radio, and other local media to argue for a carve-out that keeps tipped workers at a lower minimum. “I have built a life around the current model of tipping,” she says. …

Restaurants have warned they might boost menu prices as much as 25 percent or force servers to share more of their tips with cooks, dishwashers, and other back-of-the-house staff. …

Kshama Sawant, a socialist elected to the council on her own $15 pledge, calls those suggestions “fear mongering” and says people who cling to tips miss the point. “We don’t want any worker to be beholden to the mood of the customer on any given day,” she says.

Well. So much for the “service” industry.

I would estimate that Seattle will eventually come to regret this decision in the long run, but hey, that’s what federalism and local governance are for, I suppose — a notion that desperate Democrats in Washington are currently refusing to grasp.

Tags: business, economy, jobs, minimum wage, progressives, Seattle

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Piketty’snewgildedagewhichisn’t posted

Piketty’s new gilded age which isn’t

posted at 2:01 pm on April 27, 2014 by Jazz Shaw

Progressive hearts are all aflutter this week, riding high on the continued coverage of Thomas Piketty and his new book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” which continues to fly off the virtual shelves at Amazon. To say that Piketty’s basic premise is flawed is probably too much of a compliment. Ed already looked at one of the fundamental assertions last week – that median household income had only risen 3.2% over the past three decades – and found it to be off by a factor of ten.

But there are other, deeper problems with the Piketty model. One of them is the idea that capitalism itself is flawed at its foundation, leading to some new gilded age where a handful of families always gather in and hoard the wealth for generations, leaving others to starve in the cold. Unfortunately, even people like David Brooks have bought into the concept without examining it fully.

Politically, the global wealth tax is utopian, as even Piketty understands. If the left takes it up, they are marching onto a bridge to nowhere. But, in the current mania, it is being embraced.

This is a moment when progressives have found their worldview and their agenda. This move opens up a huge opportunity for the rest of us in the center and on the right. First, acknowledge that the concentration of wealth is a concern with a beefed up inheritance tax.

We should have seen this one coming from day one. The claims regarding the horrors of income inequality had to lead to a call for a not only renewed, but expanded death tax. This, in addition to steep income taxes which Brooks claims Piketty does not support, but in fact, are part and parcel of his plan.

Mr. Piketty urges an 80% tax rate on incomes starting at “$500,000 or $1 million.” This is not to raise money for education or to increase unemployment benefits. Quite the contrary, he does not expect such a tax to bring in much revenue, because its purpose is simply “to put an end to such incomes.” It will also be necessary to impose a 50%-60% tax rate on incomes as low as $200,000 to develop “the meager US social state.” There must be an annual wealth tax as high as 10% on the largest fortunes and a one-time assessment as high as 20% on much lower levels of existing wealth. He breezily assures us that none of this would reduce economic growth, productivity, entrepreneurship or innovation.

Fortunately, Dr. Joyner takes a look at several studies of the Piketty manifesto and finds that the aforementioned allegation of the new gilded age is also a non-starter. He looks at the work done by Heidi Moore, who claims that these rich capitalist families have already long since hogged up all the wealth and nobody can ever catch up.

Except, as even Krugman readily points out, none of this is true! Indeed, most of the super wealthy class in America at least are in the finance sector. Whatever other criticisms might be made of that group, that they inherited their riches is not among them.

The discussion that Piketty and others have made possible, and that Krugman and others have helped popularize, is worth having. But it’s likely to be steered in the direction of the stupid by the likes of The Guardian. That’s a pity.

Read all of that Joyner article, by the way. There’s a lot of good meat in it. But it also leads us back to the one part of the discussion which Brooks actually gets right in the previously quoted column.

Third, emphasize that the historically proven way to reduce inequality is lifting people from the bottom with human capital reform, not pushing down the top. In short, counter angry progressivism with unifying uplift.

This, in the end, is the fundamental difference between conservative and progressive solutions to income inequality. It’s true that there are many, many people in America who are doing poorly in a struggling middle class or very poorly in poverty. But the progressive solution is to narrow the gap by eating the rich and dragging them down closer to the bottom of the pool. The conservative agenda is to close the space between the tiers by creating more wealthy people through expansion of opportunity and steadying the ladder so those with the drive to succeed can join the successful at the top. It’s a rather stark contrast.

Tags: economics, economist, progressives, taxes

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HouseDemocratstoEPA:Thatfrackingregulationthat

House Democrats to EPA: That fracking regulation that you left to the states? Big mistake.

posted at 1:21 pm on April 4, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

The rapidly rising fortunes of shale gas via the hydraulic fracturing boom have been a rather irritating inconvenience for progressive eco-radicals and their extreme anti-fossil fuel goals. Natural gas has proven to be a more cleanly-burning alternative to coal, releasing far fewer carbon emissions in the process, and the stuff is going to be plentifully available and economically profitable for both domestic consumption and exports for decades and decades to come — which means that the green lobby’s willfully-self-impoverishing, all-renewables-or-bust agenda doesn’t have quite the weighty urgency that they claimed it did even just a few years ago, and they find themselves having to turn to other methods to try and throw wrenches into the works of the oil-and-gas industry. Wrenches, like, say, relentlessly pressuring the Obama administration toward an ultimately fruitless disavowal of the Keystone XL pipeline, or trying to get the Environmental Protection Agency to re-up studies that they hope will lead to more prohibitively top-down federal drilling regulations, via The Hill:

Eight Democrats in the House have asked Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reopen its investigations into water contamination incidents in Wyoming, Pennsylvania and Texas that they say may have been connected to natural gas drilling, including hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. …

“While we appreciate that states act as the major source of regulation for unconventional drilling operations, we believe the Environmental Protection Agency has a key role to play in oil and gas development,” the Democrats wrote.

“We are writing to urge you to take any and all steps within your power to help these communities,” the said. …

The letter was signed Reps. Matt Cartwright (Pa.), Alan Lowenthal (Calif.), Jared Huffman (Calif.), Raul Grijalva (Ariz.), Keith Ellison (Minn.), David Scott (Ga.), Mark Pocan (Wis.) and Rush Holt (N.J.).

Do you appreciate that the states, who obviously have their own best interests in mind, can act as the major source of regulation for fracking, though? Because it kind of sounds like you don’t.

The EPA has investigated the environmentalist Left’s persistent and wildly exaggerated claims of groundwater contamination from hydraulic fracturing on several occasions through the past few years; then, last year, they dropped one case and decided to leave two others to the regulatory auspices of the states in which the investigations were taking place. The Obama administration might not sincerely love natural gas, but they’ve apparently decided not to hinder it too much for now, touting its status as a “bridge fuel” in their “all of the above” energy plan — and, well, state-level regulation that can less ideologically take into account both environmental and economic impacts of its decisions? The eco-radicals just aren’t big fans of that at all.

Tags: Environmental Protection Agency, environmentalism, fossil fuels, fracking, natural gas, progressives

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California:Bytheway,thatbullettrainisn’t

California: By the way, that bullet train isn’t actually going to be as fast as we said it would be

posted at 5:21 pm on March 28, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

When California first put the issue of building a high-speed bullet train between Los Angeles and San Francisco before voters, Gov. Jerry Brown made all sorts of nifty-sounding promises about how efficient, convenient, and fiscally sound a choice the rail line would be for Californians. All of those promises have more or less turned out to be a sham by now, as the train’s costs have exploded and its deadlines pushed way back, and now it appears that that less-than-three-hour ride Californians were originally promised… well, probably isn’t. Via the LA Times:

Regularly scheduled service on California’s bullet train system will not meet anticipated trip times of two hours and 40 minutes between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and are likely to take nearly a half-hour longer, a state Senate committee was told Thursday.

The faster trips were held out to voters in 2008 when they approved $9 billion in borrowing to help pay for the project. Since then, a series of political compromises and planning changes designed to keep the $68-billion line moving ahead have created slower track zones in urban areas.

But Louis Thompson, chairman of the High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group, a state-sanctioned panel of outside experts, testified that “real world engineering issues” will cause schedules for regular service to exceed the target of two hours and 40 minutes. The state might be able to demonstrate a train that could make the trip that fast, but not on scheduled service, he told lawmakers. If public demand for the service supports additional investments, travel times could be improved after the currently planned system is built, he said.

Sure, the train’s travel times could be improved “if public demand for service supports additional investments,” except that Brown’s administration doesn’t even know where they’re going to get the money for the project as-is. Sources of funding have been disappearing as the train has been exposed for the epically terrible investment that it is, and the its general unpopularity is growing — all before they’ve even started laying track.

Weirdly enough, though, Gov. Brown — who is going for reelection and a fourth term as California governor — isn’t backing away from the project in the slightest, and that… doesn’t actually seem to be hurting his chances. At all. As BuzzFeed points out:

The project faces legal troubles and opposition for mutating beyond what voters OKed. A petition for extraordinary writ was filed Friday in the Sacramento Superior Court, asking to expedite a decision on whether the California High-Speed Rail Authority is legally compliant with the six-year-old plans. Oral arguments begin May 20.

“It’s certainly my belief this project is a financial disaster in waiting, but certainly the governor doesn’t see it that way,” Dave Schonbrunn, president of Transdef, a pro-high-speed rail group opposed to the current project, told BuzzFeed.

Schonbrunn called it a “sinking ship.” Still, he doesn’t believe Brown’s support will hurt his reelection chances because, “He’s otherwise doing an OK job and the state’s not otherwise in crisis.” Brown’s approval rating hit a record high in January, with 60% of likely voters approving of the job he’s doing, a Public Policy Institute of California poll found.

Huh. I suppose it’s true that the state isn’t “otherwise in crisis” — because honestly, who really considers a mounting “wall of debt” and a slew of unfunded pension liabilities a crisis? Nobody in la-la-land, that’s for sure. Democratic supermajority, for the win.

Tags: Budget, California, high-speed rail, Jerry Brown, progressives

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MSNBC host: There are studies that show you are “literally” more likely to be beamed up by a UFO than find a case of voter fraud

MSNBChost:Therearestudiesthatshowyou

The most dangerous wedding photo evah?

Themostdangerousweddingphotoevah? posted

JuanWilliams:TreatmentofCondiRicebyRutgers

Juan Williams: Treatment of Condi Rice by Rutgers a hateful liberal double standard for black conservatives

posted at 12:01 pm on March 7, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

The rejection of Condoleezza Rice as a commencement speaker at Rutgers by its faculty council won’t surprise many Hot Air readers. It doesn’t surprise Fox News commentator and generally liberal Juan Williams, but he’s not shrugging it off, either. Williams, who has written about the shocking treatment of black conservatives by his supposedly enlightened liberal brethren, makes sure to note this episode as yet another marker in a long arc of hatred and bigotry against African-Americans who dare to challenge liberal orthodoxy — even Juan Williams himself:

There is a disgraceful double standard amongst liberals, particularly those in academia, in the hatred they direct at black conservatives.

We saw this last April when the conservative neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson was forced to step down as a Commencement Speaker for Johns Hopkins University (where he ably served as the head of pediatric neurosurgery).

Liberals on the Hopkins campus mobilized against Carson because he criticized President Obama’s health care reform law and said that he opposed gay marriage.

I am not a conservative but I have spoken out for years against the staggering amount blind hatred directed at black conservatives by liberals.

Liberals are shockingly quick to demean and dismiss brilliant black people like Rice, Carson, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), Professor Walter E. Williams and economist Thomas Sowell because they don’t fit into the role they have carved out for a black person in America.

Black Americans must be obedient liberals on all things or risk being called a race traitor or an Uncle Tom.

In part, this is a power play more than anything else. The faculty at Rutgers don’t want to deal with people who oppose their preferred policies, or more importantly, cause others in their little bubbles to think critically about the only sanctioned ideology in those bubbles, either. In that sense, there is no double standard at work here — Jim DeMint and John Bolton would be just as unwelcome at Rutgers as Condoleezza Rice is and Clarence Thomas would be.

That is in itself a double standard. The same faculty who would protest if pushed out the door of their sinecures over political disagreements as a violation of academic freedom suddenly refuse to offer that same courtesy to the administration in its choice of commencement speakers, or to invited guests of the university. Rather than simply declien to attend or encourage others to do the same, they want heterodoxy silenced. ‘Freedom for thee but not for me’ is hardly a consistent approach to liberty, but it’s at least consistent with the sanctioned ideology they’re protecting.

Still, the vitriol of the reactions to Rice, Thomas, Scott, and the rest goes beyond even that double standard. The attacks on them as Uncle Toms and house slaves (and worse) show the place that politics and identity hold in the progressive mindset. It’s inexplicable to progressives that a black man growing up in the South might value individual liberty over group identity and be suspicious of government power, and so the only explanation for Clarence Thomas is that he’s insufficiently black. It’s not just on ethnicity, either, but also on gender. Take a look at the unhinged and ignorant rant by Jamie Stiehm attacking Sonia Sotomayor for her insufficient woman-ness by issuing a temporary stay in the Little Sisters of the Poor case against the HHS mandate. Steihm couldn’t be bothered to do even minimal research before branding Sotomayor a gender traitor over a meaningless pause in enforcement.

What is it called when someone assumes that people have to act and believe in a certain way based on the color of their skin or the composition of their genitals? The word is on the tip of my tongue …

Tags: academia, bigotry, black conservatives, double standard, Juan Williams, progressives

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Source from: hotair

Globalisteco-progressivesgettingprettyexcitedabouttheirprospects

Globalist eco-progressives getting pretty excited about their prospects for that 2015 global climate treaty

posted at 1:01 pm on March 1, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

With their undying preferences for problem-solving via top-down, forcibly collectivized “expert” action that reliably leads to mutual impoverishment — rather than the bottom-up innovations and efficiencies that can both conserve and enrich — the ultra-progressive and self-proclaimed “green” international bureaucratic set is getting pretty excited about their chances to finally get everyone to come together for their ever-elusive endgame, The Global Climate Treaty. The United Nations has been pushing for a gigantically redistributive and economically self-flagellating treaty on behalf of global warming for eons, and now they have their sights specifically set on a big meeting that’s happening in Paris in 2015 — and a report that was released to much fanfare on Thursday has them all heartily slapping themselves on the back. Via Reuters:

An explosion in the number of laws passed around the world aimed at confronting climate change in the last 20 years was hailed on Thursday as a step toward building support for a United Nations climate treaty to be negotiated in 2015.

Countries that together account for most global greenhouse gas emissions have passed nearly 500 laws since the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty was signed in 1992, with emerging economies leading many of the recent efforts, according to a report released by the Global Legislators Organisation (GLOBE) and the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics. …

The U.N. climate treaty to be negotiated next year is expected to consist of pledges of specific actions, or “contributions,” from nearly 200 countries, aimed at reducing greenhouse gases. …

Others at the report’s launch, including House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, said that with the U.S. House now controlled by Republicans and the Senate run by Democrats, efforts at legislation are likely to be stymied by policy gridlock.

An excellent point, Leader Pelosi, if disingenuously made: Our divided Congress does essentially mean that Americans are unwilling to go merrily along with whatever cockamamie scheme the powers that be at the United Nations can come up with — but hey, there’s an executive action for that! In keeping with their feeble go-it-alone strategy, the Obama administration is reportedly looking at ways to abide by the potential terms of the hoped-for treaty without the requisite Senate ratification. Via the NJ:

It’s possible that 2015 United Nations climate talks in Paris could produce a global agreement structured in a manner that does not need Senate ratification. …

“We don’t know yet what governments are going to decide, but it is very clear that they will have to find some way to have a draft in Paris that will be robust, that will give certainty, and that will be politically digestible in all countries,” Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told reporters on the sidelines of a Capitol Hill event on this study.

Reflecting on @GLOBE_intl report: shows how far countries have come on #climate, bodes well for #Paris2015 http://t.co/DrNgAFIHg5

— Christiana Figueres (@CFigueres) February 28, 2014

…Riiiiiiight.

I think we probably need to step back and get a few things straight here. First of all, I don’t know that there’s much that President Obama could or would do via executive action that would accomplish the kind of sweeping, ahem, “reform” that the United Nations is looking for, on the level of carbon taxes and giant mandated renewable portfolios or making climate reparations or what have you. More importantly, however — whether it is via executive action or Senate ratification — what exactly is to stop the United States or any country from reneging on the terms of this lofty agreement when they inevitably figure out that it’s a costly, inefficient, and ineffective boondoggle? What is going to prevent a new U.S. president, Republican or Democrat, from immediately nixing the whole thing, especially if it was done via the executive branch? I might also add that Canada withdrew from the Kyoto protocol when they realized it was getting in the way of their prosperity; Germany was among the first to reach their Kyoto targets, and now their Energiewende is spinning out of control from overly pricey electricity, impractical renewables, and the coal plants currently coming online to fill the gap; and meanwhile, the United States didn’t even sign the Kyoto treaty, but has been achieving cleaner skies through the very same fracking technologies that so many self-styled environmentalists unconditionally abhor.

What I’m ultimately getting at here is the utter futility of trying to scaremonger everyone on the globe into agreeing to act against their economic and financial best interests as your main policy strategy, and I’m going to point you to two pieces for some further Saturday reading: First, to Ed Rogers at the Washington Post on the conundrum of “The Prudent Rational.” Few things get my goat more than liberals who lump all people who don’t automatically prescribe to the 98 PERCENT OF CLIMATE EXPERTS AGREE WE MUST IMMEDIATELY STOP USING FOSSIL FUELS OR WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE BECAUSE THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED way of thinking into the category of knuckle-dragging, flat-earther “climate deniers.” It’s frustrating, considering that most people are not in fact “deniers” but will readily acknowledge that of course climate change is a thing. Planet earth is not and never has been a stable environment, and yes, the climate may very well be getting warmer at the moment — but is this cause for quite so much hysteria? The entire green movement is so thoroughly based off of reactionary emotionalism and bureaucratic control that they actually alienate would-be listeners and discredit themselves in the process, getting in the way of real-world solutions and causing the gridlock they claim to loathe so much.

Second, to Holman Jenkins at the WSJ, because the state of the green movement that he describes is an almost exquisitely painful facepalm for the ages. Oof.

Tags: bureaucrats, climate change, emissions, energy, green energy, progressives, regulations, United Nations

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ProgressivesnotquitereadytoletthatKeystone

Progressives not quite ready to let that Keystone XL “conflict of interest” thing go yet

posted at 2:41 pm on February 28, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

When the State Department’s inspector general announced earlier this week that the investigation into an allegedly undisclosed conflict-of-interest problem with the contractor they hired to conduct Keystone XL’s draft environmental impact report failed to bear any fruit, Rep. Raul Grijalva — the same Arizona Democratic representative who put together this ultra-sciencey anti-Keystone vid and who’s been taking some heat for neglecting his Congressional duties in favor of showy protests with his fellow eco-radicals — was most displeased. He penned this little ditty over at the New York Times (I’ll direct you to Charles Cooke at NRO for a thorough dressing-down on that front), and rather conveniently, just the day before, Sens. Barbara Boxer of California and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island had begun a similar effort to leave no straw left ungrasped with a plea to Secretary Kerry to initiate a more health-centric impact study on the Keystone XL pipeline’s construction. Naturally, these hyper-progressives are now joining forces, via The Hill:

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) is joining Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) in his call for the Government Accountability Office to investigate the State Department’s environmental review process for the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

Boxer made the request in a letter sent to the GAO on Friday, just days after Grijalva asked for a similar investigation.

“I am writing to join Congressman Grijalva in his request. The State Department must not just follow a process for selecting outside contractors,” Boxer’s letter states. “The process must be rigorous, thorough, and transparent, especially when the project in question could put communities from Alberta, Canada, down to the Gulf Coast at risk. The American people deserve to know that their interests — not special interests — are being protected by our federal agencies.”

The GAO will probably take a couple of weeks to make a final decision on whether to investigate the process, an oh-so-auspicious use of our tax dollars on which these lawmakers and a bunch of environmentalist groups are now insisting — but please, by all means, proceed. At the end of the day, the Keystone XL pipeline will still be in our national interest, because the fact of that matter is that the United States needs to start laying down a lot more pipeline infrastructure to take better advantage of our shale oil and gas boom, and no amount of wind and solar energy is going to be able to provide a viable substitute for fossil fuels for a long time coming.

Tags: Barbara Boxer, Canada, environmentalism, Keystone XL Pipeline, Oil and Gas Industry, progressives

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Source from: hotair