URLs du Jour

2009-07-07

  • Need a couple good reasons to tell your state's Senators to vote against Waxman-Markey? You'll find them here, plus forty-eight more. Summary:
    Two main things to understand about Waxman-Markey: First, it will not reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, at least not at any point in the near future. The inclusion of carbon offsets, which can be manufactured out of thin air and political imagination, will eliminate most of the demands that the legislation puts on industry, though in doing so it will manage to drive up the prices consumers pay for every product that requires energy for its manufacture -- which is to say, for everything. Second, it represents a worse abuse of the public trust and purse than the stimulus and the bailouts put together. Waxman-Markey creates a permanent new regime in which environmental romanticism and corporate welfare are mixed together to form political poison. From comic bureaucratic power grabs (check out the section of the bill on candelabras) to the creation of new welfare programs for Democratic constituencies to, above all, massive giveaways for every financial, industrial, and political lobby imaginable, this bill would permanently deform American politics and economic life.
    But click on through for details.

  • If you need a fifty-first reason, however, check out Section 205, a Federal program to emit grants for tree-planting to electric companies. As long as such trees are planted according to…
    a comprehensive list of science-based measurements outlining the species and minimum distance required between trees planted pursuant to this section, in addition to the minimum required distance to be maintained between such trees and (A) building foundations (B) air conditioning units; (C) driveways and walkways; (D) property fences; (E) preexisting utility infrastructure; (F) septic systems; (G) swimming pools; and (H) other infrastructure as deemed appropriate.
    … because we're just too damn dumb to figure this out ourselves, apparently. As Joyce Kilmer noted:

    I think that I shall never see
    A poem lovely as a tree.

    A tree planted under Section 205
    which Waxman-Markey did contrive.

    A tree of species specified;
    Which will at mininum distance abide.

    A tree that will, in decades hence,
    Not destroy my neighbor's fence.

    Upon whose bosom federal grants
    Have enhanced its noble stance.

    Only God can make a tree?
    Not according to Waxman-Markey!

    Mr McQ has more substantive comments.

  • As if the GOP doesn't have enough problems: Shawn Macomber notices an announcement of a plot to kidnap UPenn Young Republicans.

    The punchline is: "because they will elicit the least public sympathy." Ouch!


Last Modified 2009-07-10 9:41 AM EDT