Last Call For Derp Of The Planet Of The Derps

Professional climate change crap thrower Steven Moore takes to the National Review to compare environmentalists to apes, and figures we'll be in the Stone Age after a couple more Democratic presidents.

This weekend I went to the see the blockbuster movie Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and an Investor’s Business Daily editorial this week got me thinking about a bleak scenario. Our future won’t have ape rulers, but, IBD points out, a world without energy might well look similar.

So, second graph in, we're straight to "a world without energy" because CLOWARD-PIVEN GREEN FASCISM.  We're approaching zero Kelvin!

In the movie, bands of humans are resisting a global government of super-intelligent monkeys, gorillas and the like. The humans lack access to electricity, making their struggle — let along the normal life we know today — nearly impossible.

Yeah, let the message of that sink in for a bit.  Government of "gorillas and the like".

They are rendered powerless — literally. The simian despots understand that depriving the humans of access to electricity will keep them underfoot. (The climax of the movie, as IBD explains, has humans in San Francisco — of all places — heroically reopening a power plant and bringing electricity back to the whole city.)

You starting to get the picture that maybe Caesar and his monkeys are being equated to President Obama just a bit here?

I wonder how many Americans got the subtle message here: Energy is the master resource. Without it, we return to a Stone Age existence. Life in its absence is nasty, brutish and short.

Your message is about as subtle as the wet splatter of tossed feces on a white silk dress, Steve.  Also, about as relevant.  Look, this guy is openly comparing climate change scientists and the governments that believe those scientists to science fiction monkeys.  This is his argument.  Forget the actual science here, talking monkeys with guns!

Obama will take your guns, your freedom, your electricity, any day now.

Is that where the radical Greens, one of the most influential political forces in America today, would take us? If we continue to follow their advice, electric power and fuel will become more expensive (as President Obama has admitted). TheInvestor’s Business Daily editorial noted, “as the Sierra Club, billionaire Tom Steyer and the Obama administration rage war against coal and other fossil fuel,” we could end up seeing “rolling brownouts and even blackouts in the years ahead.”

Yes, because the massive, massive preponderance of scientific evidence predicting that we're going to screw the ecosystem over with greenhouse gases is actually just the fevered product of "radical greens".  Wanting to not have your grandkids roasting while the world is fighting over potable water is "radical".

If these clowns are right, then power outages.  If the scientists are right, then underwater coastal cities.  The latter just may be worse than power outages.

The greens say, no problem, we will shift to renewable energy. But it’s not so simple, as IBD points out: States with onerous renewable-energy standards such as Colorado and California are still relying heavily on coal to fill in the gaps during bad weather or periods of high demand.

Sure.  We're not at 100% renewable energy sources yet.  But that would be a nuance for people that don't go straight to "a world without energy" in the second paragraph.

Sorry, for the foreseeable future, we aren’t going to get our power for our $18 trillion economy from wind turbines and solar panels. And if we begin to try, prices are going to skyrocket.

Except for the part where solar technology has advanced to the point where new solar plants can turn out energy for less money per kilowatt than coal.

Last summer our suburban home in northern Virginia lost power for two days during a storm. No lights, no computers, no air conditioning, no TV, no iPods or iPhones. To my three sons, this was like hell on earth. How did people live without electricity? They wondered. Very poorly, I told them.

I wonder how many young people will be so excited about “green energy” when such outages are commonplace and they come to the realization that life without those “dirty” sources of power won’t be so wonderful.

You know, Moore seems pretty concerned about the state of our electrical power infrastructure.  Perhaps we should take steps now to make sure America's power transmission lines stay in good shape rather than cutting funding.  Better still, investing in home solar seems like a good idea.

We don’t need apes to destroy our planet. The green humans seems to be doing a fine job of it all on their own.

This coming from the folks that will happily bring you the destruction of the planet's ecosystem in order to "roll coal".  That's an hysterical bit of monkey business.

Exchange Of Fire

Today a pair of Republican-appointed judges on a three judge panel have voted to effectively destroy Obamacare by removing subsidies for federally-run exchanges.  Ian Millhiser:

The two Republicans’ decision rests on a glorified typo in the Affordable Care Act itself. Obamacare gives states a choice. They can either run their own health insurance exchange where their residents may buy health insurance, and receive subsidies to help them pay for that insurance if they qualify, or they can allow the federal government to run that exchange for them. Yet the plaintiffs’ in this case uncovered a drafting error in the statute where it appears to limit the subsidies to individuals who obtain insurance through “an Exchange established by the State.” Randolph and Griffith’s opinion concludes that this drafting error is the only thing that matters. In their words, “a federal Exchange is not an ‘Exchange established by the State,’” and that’s it. The upshot of this opinion is that 6.5 million Americans will lose their ability to afford health insurance, according to one estimate.

It's effectively a miswording, and for that, millions of Americans stand to lose affordable health care.   Republicans are of course really happy this, which is all you really need to know.

The unsuccessful legal argument claiming that the individual mandate was unconstitutional was a major prong of the Republican attack on the law as early as 2009. Yet, even after the GOP decided that defeating Obamacare in court was their number one policy priority, after Republican officials in numerous states brought a high-profile lawsuit seeking to kill this law, and after they hired one of the best lawyers in the country to drive this litigation, no one noticed the alleged flaw in the statute that Randolph and Griffith rely upon today. The reason why is obvious. Not even the many Republican officials who filed briefs seeking to kill this law the first time around actually believed that the law was intended to deny subsidies to people who buy insurance in federal exchanges. 

To get around this fact, Randolph and Griffith spin an alternative history of the Affordable Care Act’s passage. A major prong of this alternative history claims that Congress wanted to deny subsidies to people in states with federally-run exchanges because that that would provide states with an incentive to start their own exchange — in Randolph and Griffith’s words, Congress “us[ed] subsidies as an incentive to gain states’ cooperation.” Thus, in this narrative, Congress viewed getting states to run exchanges as an all-encompassing goal, trumping even the law’s stated goals of providing “Affordable Coverage Choices for All Americans” and achieving “near-universal coverage.” Needless to say, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Congress actually viewed the administrative question of which set of government bureaucrats would run a particular state’s exchange as a question of such superseding importance that they were willing to deny health coverage to millions of people in order to ensure that the right set of bureaucrats run the exchanges in each state.

Selective mindreading, 101.  That's what this ludicrous case boils down to, but for now, Republicans have managed to hurt millions of American families over what's effectively a typo.

But that's what Republicans do, after all.  So please, Republican pundits, go on TV and tell everyone how awesome it is for 6 or 7 million people to lose affordable health insurance because of the Chewbacca Defense.

Let me know how that works out for you in November, with the whole "rooting for America to fail" thing.

Meanwhile, considering the full DC Circuit Court would be 7-4 Democrats, I'm thinking this will get overturned on a full en banc hearing rather quickly.  Oh, and to top it all off, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals also issued its ruling on the law, and it upheld the subsidies.  Stay tuned.

Turnout For What?

If primary voting turnout in 2014 is any indication of election turnout, then Democrats are going to get absolutely stomped because we're going to stay home and pout rather than vote.

A new study shows that Americans are on-track to set a new low for turnout in a midterm election, and a record number of states could set their own new records for lowest percentage of eligible citizens casting ballots. 

The study, from the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, shows turnout in the 25 states that have held statewide primaries for both parties is down by nearly one-fifth from the last midterm, in 2010. While 18.3 percent of eligible voters cast ballots back then, it has been just 14.8 percent so far this year. Similarly, 15 of the 25 states that have held statewide primaries so far have recorded record-low turnout. 

Ouch. 

This is all the more depressing when you realize that, less than 50 years ago, primary turnout was twice as high.

And we're going to let the Republicans win, because we don't give enough of a damn to go vote them out.

What's perhaps most notable, though, is the partisan difference. Republican primary turnout overtook Democratic turnout for the first time in 2010, and that difference is even bigger this primary season. 

 

Courtesy: Center for the Study of the American Electorate

In fact, GOP primary turnout has been pretty steady over the past four decades, but Democratic turnout has dropped consistently -- including by about 30 percent this year, from 8.7 percent to 6.1 percent. That's the biggest decline on-record. 

This is hardly the first warning sign when it comes to Democrats' turnout problem (see here, here, here and here). But if it portends anything close to what's coming in the 2014 election, that's really, really troubling for Democrats.

 So, it's up to us.   If we stay home, then we're going to get smashed.  Not voting only helps the GOP, folks.  You'd though we'd have learned that by now.

StupidiNews!

• A train carrying the bodies of the victims of downed Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 has reached the Ukranian city of Kharkiv as families await word of their lost loved ones.
• Last month was the hottest June on record, since global record-keeping began in 1880, according to NOAA climate scientists.
• President Obama and Vice President Biden will make a push for job training and economic growth as the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act is signed into law.
• A new study finds that 54 percent of jobs in the European Union are in danger of being automated or eliminated over the next 20 years.
• Warner Bros. has apparently optioned the movie rights to Space Invaders, with actual Hollywood directors and producers tied to the project.