From Son of Spengler, this observation that Administrative State (re: Bureaucracy) may now be the Republicans’ bane of existence even if they hold the House and Senate AND gain the Oval Office (emphasis mine):

In fact, Obama has not achieved his successes through formal, Constitutional means, but through executive agencies and the courts. Those democratically-unaccountable institutions are comprised of people who share Obama’s vision and have largely been happy to stretch the boundaries of their institutions’ power and the law. The only arena in which Obama has been obliged to persuade, cajole, or fire is defense; even there, a culture of deference to elected civilian authority has made Obama’s job fairly easy. Otherwise, he just rode the Federal Beast in the direction it already wanted to go. He has been able to spend his days golfing, while the media — a cadre of progressive activists — has been there to cheer him on.

Read more

Uh-huh, another day, another problem from the Feds (w/contributions from the States, too).  This is what happens when the Smart People decide they know better for everyone than each of those hundreds of million everyones making their own decisions for themselves.  Get that – those in govt believe that they not only have the Smarts but the Right to outweigh the millions of choices made by individuals whom each is making those choices out of their OWN self-interest.  This is the thing that Statists can’t grasp or accept – that people are better at this individually and in the aggregate bottom up than they are. So here we go again (reformatted, emphasis mine):

Federal subsidies have created a massive “green bubble” in the solar industry that is in danger of bursting when they expire next year, leaving taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars, according to a report by theTaxpayers Protection Alliance(TPA). Homeowners and businesses that install a solar energy system are currently entitled to a 30 percent Solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC), which was initially passed by Congress in 2006 and extended for another eight years in 2008.

However, the ITC will drop to 10 percent for commercial and zero for residential properties on Dec. 31, 2016.  And even members of the heavily-subsidized solar industry, which provides less than one percent of the nation’s electricity, are worried that it cannot stand on its own without government handouts.

Read more

Care of Ace. I tried not to scrape all of it but there’s no good place to cut so here it is – most of it.

I watched this on YouTube last night and planned to discuss it since; I’m a bit unsure how to discuss it, because the points Cooke makes — that Trump has been (or is, depending on the issue, and depending when you ask him) “very pro choice,” in favor of the nonsense assault weapons ban, in favor of single payer socialized medicine (he cites socialist Canada and socialist-on-England’s-dime Scotland as success stories), in favor of a wealth tax on the rich, considers himself more of a Democrat than a Republican, and of course has donated lots of money and praise to Hillary Clinton and her shady Foundation — are simply deemed to not matter, for reasons that are never fully articulated.

Read more

We can’t build a wall!  We can’t deport them all!  They won’t self-deport!

Well, Israel has shown that a wall works very well indeed (not 100%, but very well when compared to prior to the wall.  And there is a country that is taking on the other two as they have decided they have no choice, given how they have boxed themselves in.

As we have been watching Great Britain, the Labour Party (which would be called outright Socialists here, and I don’t mean it well) self-decided that it hated its own base and fellow countrymen.  So once gaining power, they basically opened their borders (re: no borders) and decided multiculturalism was far better than their own culture.

Sidenote: that’s what Socialists are and do – they are self-loathing of their own country and its traditions.  Remind you of a certain political Party?  Or is that two of ’em?

Read more

Er, not so much.  Just like how the Government standards on saturated fats have just been dropped (e.g., meats, dairy, eggs) and now it seems that the low carb diet is now falling out of favor.  Yes, so much for settled science.  And again, we are seeing that in governmental policy that the best watt is the watt not used – not as much of an ROI as we’ve been told by the Greenies and the Left (who have been trying to deindustrialize us and lower our standard of living (Weekly Standard, emphasis mine):

This change involves environmentalists having to undergo an embarrassing about-face and recognize that one of their favorite slogans isn’t true. For years environmentalists have promoted energy conservation measures for buildings and homes with the claim that such improvements “paid for themselves” and were more cost-effective than building new power plants. The EPA and the Department of Energy happily touted claims that conservation resulted in lower energy bills, and were therefore competitive, cost-effective investments.

But there’s a growing body of economic research going back more than 15 years that finds the conservation claims to be exaggerated, when they are not completely wrong.

Read more

OC Register (emphasis mine):

Across the nation, progressives increasingly look at California as a model state. This tendency has increased as climate change has emerged as the Democratic Party’s driving issue. To them, California’s recovery from a very tough recession is proof positive that you can impose ever greater regulation on everything from housing to electricity and still have a thriving economy.

And to be sure, the state has finally recovered the jobs lost in the 2007-09 recession, largely a result of a boom in values of stocks and high- end real estate. Things, however, have not been so rosy in key blue-collar fields, such as construction, which is still more than 200,000 jobs below prerecession levels, or manufacturing, where the state has lost over one-third of its employment since 2000. Homelessness, which one would think should be in decline during a strong economy, is on the rise in Orange County and even more so in Los Angeles.

Read more

MAGINE AN ELECTION—A close one. You’re undecided. So you type the name of one of the candidates into your search engine of choice. (Actually, let’s not be coy here. In most of the world, one search engine dominates; in Europe and North America, it’s Google.) And Google coughs up, in fractions of a second, articles and facts about that candidate. Great! Now you are an informed voter, right? But a study published this week says that the order of those results, the ranking of positive or negative stories on the screen, can have an enormous influence on the way you vote. And if the election is close enough, the effect could be profound enough to change the outcome.

Read more