Liberals block renewable energy

Typical Liberals, Democrats, anti-technology Greens, environmentalists and NIMBY's block wind generation and transmission infrastructure.

This article is from the Wall Street Journal August 18, 2008. Link to article : http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121901822110148233.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks
All credit goes to WSJ.

Wind Jammers
August 18, 2008

In this year's great energy debate, Democrats describe a future when the U.S. finally embraces the anything-but-carbon avant-garde. It turns out, however, that when wind and solar power do start to come on line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many Democrats.

To wit, the greens are blocking the very transmission network needed for renewable electricity to move throughout the economy. The best sites for wind and solar energy happen to be in the sticks -- in the desert Southwest where sunlight is most intense for longest, or the plains where the wind blows most often. To exploit this energy, utilities need to build transmission lines to connect their electricity to the places where consumers actually live. In addition to other technical problems, the transmission gap is a big reason wind only provides two-thirds of 1% of electricity generated in the U.S., and solar one-tenth of 1%.

Only last week, Duke Energy and American Electric Power announced a $1 billion joint venture to build a mere 240 miles of transmission line in Indiana necessary to accommodate new wind farms. Yet the utilities don't expect to be able to complete the lines for six long years -- until 2014, at the earliest, because of the time necessary to obtain regulatory approval and rights-of-way, plus the obligatory lawsuits.

In California, hundreds turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. The environmental class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park. "It's kind of schizophrenic behavior," Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently. "They say that we want renewable energy, but we don't want you to put it anywhere."

California has a law mandating that utilities generate 20% of their electricity from "clean-tech" by 2010. Some 24 states have adopted a "renewable portfolio standard," while Barack Obama wants to impose a national renewable mandate. But the states, with the exception of Texas, didn't make transmission lines easier to build, though it won't prevent them from penalizing the power companies that fail to meet an impossible goal.

Texas is now the wind capital of America (though wind still generates only 3% of state electricity) because it streamlined the regulatory and legal snarls that block transmission in other states. By contrast, though Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor Ed Rendell adopted wind power as a main political plank, he and Senator Bob Casey are leading a charge to repeal a 2005 law that makes transmission lines slightly easier to build.

Wind power has also become contentious in oh-so-green Oregon, once people realized that transmission lines would cut through forests. Transmissions lines from a wind project on the Nevada-Idaho border are clogged because of possible effects on the greater sage grouse. Similar melodramas are playing out in Arizona, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Tennessee, West Virginia, northern Maine, upstate New York, and elsewhere.

In other words, the liberal push for alternatives has the look of a huge bait-and-switch. Washington responds to the climate change panic with multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidies for supposedly clean tech. But then when those incentives start to have an effect in the real world, the same greens who favor the subsidies say build the turbines or towers somewhere else. The only energy sources they seem to like are the ones we don't have.

Typical anti-technology hypocritical libs. They are for renewable energy but it cannot be seen or heard. How will electricity be transmitted? Last time I looked, transmission lines are the ONLY way to do this. Do greenies know how electricity is generated and transmitted? Do greenies know that we are using the same electrical transmission lines that were built in the 1950's and hardly any new lines have been built to handle current day electrical loads?

You cannot bury high voltage transmission lines like your buried residential 220V lines that go to your house. It is too hard to maintain and the risks to the people and the grid is too high.

Electricity is the backbone of life here in America.

I guess the greenies do not remember the 2003 blackouts that California was struck with. Electricity from the Pacific North West goes down to California via two high transmission lines. If one of those lines go down, LA and probably the rest of southern California is screwed since the other line cannot handle the load. I doubt the power lines from Nevada/Arizona could handle the load.

In closing, improving an old infrastructure is great and once again the people who would rather let us sit in darkness of the 18th century reveal themselves as liberals. What was the name of that guy who uses 200+ kilowatt hours a month on his house...

Say Hey! The Dems Have Given Up on the WA 5th Congressional District!

A story in Sunday's Spokesman-Review reported how Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers has raised over a million dollars so far, while her Democratic opponent, Spokane psychologist Mark Mays, has raised only $36,085. McMorris Rodgers has raised more than that on just the South Hill of Spokane. It's embarrassing.

$36,085? You can't run for the state House of Representatives on that kind of money, much less the U.S. Congress. McMorris Rodgers last opponent, rancher Peter Goldmark, who is now running for Commissioner of State Lands, is a darling of the netroots. He raised nearly $2.5 million in 2006, most of it from out of the district. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee designated the 2006 5th District election as one of their "Red To Blue" races. However, even though Goldmark outspent McMorris Rodgers by some $500,000, he got throughly spanked by 13%.

Now, apparently, the Dems have given up on Washington's 5th Congressional District. Rep. McMorris Rodgers, having solidly defended her seat after her freshman term, is only facing sacrificial lamb Mays this time around. It is an indication of how 5th District Dems view Mays' chances that the biggest contribution, $5,000 (14% of total contributions), has come from the state party.

In what promises to be a banner year for Democrats, with candidates nationwide grabbing Obama's coattails and the party with flush with lots of cash to throw around in once unassailble Republican districts (e.g. the Idaho 1st, with incumbent Rep. Bill Sali facing Walt Minnick) it is inexplicable why the Dems in Eastern Washington are not making a stronger run in 2008. Willie Mays has a better shot of getting elected to Congress than Mark Mays. I won't even get started on the weak Democratic candidates fielded in the 9th Legislative District and Whitman County.

Sen. Patty Murray's Shocking Discovery - Capitalism!

"With regard for nothing but their own profits, some traders are bidding up oil prices by buying huge quantities of oil just to resell at an even higher price.

You see, these traders never plan on actually using the oil they buy. They just keep buying it to inflate the price so that they can make more and more money when they turn around and sell it. The problem is, families like yours and mine are stuck paying the bill." ~ Washington State Senator and tennis shoe wearing mom, Patty Murray on today's Democrat Radio Address.

Has the woman never even ran a lemonade stand when she was a kid? Is she so out of touch with reality that she thinks retail stores exist on thin air and good intentions? Has she never heard of Wall Street, or the phrase "buy low, sell high?" How can anyone be so ignorant of the American free-enterprise system and be elected to one of the highest offices in the land? Or perhaps she's not as much ignorant to American capitalism as she is hostile to the idea.

Barack Hussein Obama, Exposed

Cross post from paulezimmerman.com



My apologies for the overlap with other page elements here. This thing is big... but so is the subject matter.

When Stupid People Vote

It's odd that Democrats manage to sustain the image as the choice of intellectuals. In fact, it has been conclusively shown that the the better educated one is, the more likely one is to vote Republican. The more knowledgeable on the issues one is, the more likely one is to vote Republican.

There's a reason why Democrats are always trying to make voting easier.

Recruiting Young Democrats

There's nothing like a good old satanic ritual to bring fresh blood into the tent.

Allegations that a local Democratic official and her husband were involved in satanic rituals that included shackling people to beds, caging them and depriving them of food and water have horrified county party leaders.

Joy Johnson, 30, a third vice-chairwoman of the Durham County Democratic Party and vice chairwoman of the Young Democrats, was charged Friday with two counts of aiding and abetting.

Her husband, Joseph Scott Craig, 25, was charged with second-degree rape, second-degree kidnapping and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon for an incident in January and another in May.

The two made an appearance in court Monday morning after spending the weekend in the Durham County jail.

The strangest thing about this story is that the party affiliation was mentioned. That usually only happens when a Republican is involved.

Update: Another Democrat busted!

Uh Oh, Even More Scandal Brewing for the Dems

You knew this was coming: Obama Received Sweetheart Loan Deal and Campaign Contributions from Illinois Bank .

Why would BHO act any differently than the other Dem senators caught with their snouts in the trough?

As usual, the lamestream media will completely ignore this story. Nothing can be allowed stop the ascension of the Obamessiah to his heavenly throne.

Wampumgate - Country Wide - Sen. Dodd (D) et al.

Senate Housing Bill Requires eBay, Amazon, Google, and All Credit Card Companies to Report Transactions to the Government

Washington, DC - Hidden deep in Senator Christopher Dodd's (D) 630-page Senate housing legislation is a sweeping provision that affects the privacy and operation of nearly all of America’s small businesses. The provision, which was added by the bill's managers without debate this week, would require the nation's payment systems to track, aggregate, and report information on nearly every electronic transaction to the federal government.

FreedomWorks Chairman Dick Armey commented: "This is a provision with astonishing reach, and it was slipped into the bill just this week. Not only does it affect nearly every credit card transaction in America, such as Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express, but the bill specifically targets payment systems like eBay's PayPal, Amazon, and Google Checkout that are used by many small online businesses. The privacy implications for America's small businesses are breathtaking."

"Candidate on a High Horse"

George Will has a great column in today's Washington Post dissecting Obama's condescending remarks about small-town Americans. Eltitism is not about class or affluence. It's about attitude.

FDR came from a very wealthy background, yet he never ran America or the working class down. When I was growing up in rural Franklin County, Virginia, everyone was a Democrat. Republicans rarely bothered to run for any public office. This was a legacy of FDR, who focused on rural and working Americans during the Depresssion.

However, following 1968, when the Democratic Party began to attack America and embrace far-left, out of the mainstream ideals, that hegemony gradually started to break down. The breakdown was complete by the mid-Nineties, when the Congressman from our district, Virgil Goode, switched from the Democrats to the Republicans. Now, you would be hard-pressed to find many Democrats in my home town.

Jim Webb, a war hero and former Republican Secretary of the Navy who turned Democrat, barely won a Senate seat in Virginia in 2006. He did it by running as a man of the people, not an elitist like Obama. In fact, Webb has been called a "boor" (by George Will), refers to diversity programs as “state-sponsored racism,” thinks immigration is too permissive, believes free trade and globalization are bad, and in 2007, his aide was arrested for carrying Webb's loaded pistol into a Senate office building (Webb has held a CCW in Virginia for a long time, probably one of the only Senator's to have one.) In other words, Webb is the fulfillment of Obama's "bitter white person."

Obama would do well to learn that lesson.

Barack Obama may be exactly what his supporters suppose him to be. Not, however, for reasons most Americans will celebrate.

Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many working-class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns, religion and "antipathy to people who aren't like them" because of "frustrations." His implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry are balm for resentments they feel because of America's grinding injustice.

By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, "Yes, but I need to win a majority." When another supporter told Stevenson, "You educated the people through your campaign," Stevenson replied, "But a lot of people flunked the course." Michael Barone, in "Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan," wrote: "It is unthinkable that Roosevelt would ever have said those things or that such thoughts ever would have crossed his mind." Barone added: "Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture -- the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting."

Stevenson, like Obama, energized young, educated professionals for whom, Barone wrote, "what was attractive was not his platform but his attitude." They sought from Stevenson "not so much changes in public policy as validation of their own cultural stance." They especially rejected "American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States was specially good and decent," rather than -- in Michelle Obama's words -- "just downright mean."

The emblematic book of the new liberalism was "The Affluent Society" by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. He argued that the power of advertising to manipulate the bovine public is so powerful that the law of supply and demand has been vitiated. Manufacturers can manufacture in the American herd whatever demand the manufacturers want to supply. Because the manipulable masses are easily given a "false consciousness" (another category, like religion as the "opiate" of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism), four things follow:
First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats.

The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there in 1981. Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims -- the indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.

Obama's dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.

Hofstadter dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders -- a "paranoid style" of politics rooted in "status anxiety," etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension.

Obama voiced such liberalism with his "bitterness" remarks to an audience of affluent San Franciscans. Perfect.

When Democrats convened in San Francisco in 1984, en route to losing 49 states, Jeane Kirkpatrick -- a former FDR Democrat then serving in the Cabinet of another such, Ronald Reagan -- said "San Francisco Democrats" are people who "blame America first." Today they blame Americans for America being "downright mean."

Obama's apology for his embittering sociology of "bitterness" -- "I didn't say it as well as I should have" -- occurred in Muncie, Ind. Perfect.

In 1929 and 1937, Robert and Helen Lynd published two seminal books of American sociology. They were sympathetic studies of a medium-size manufacturing city they called "Middletown," coping -- reasonably successfully, optimistically and harmoniously -- with life's vicissitudes. "Middletown" was in fact Muncie, Ind.

Dino Rossi Announces Transportation Plan

I lived in the Washington, DC area from 1985-1997. I experienced some of the worst commutes to work you can imagine.

I lived in the Seattle area from 1997-1999 and experienced equally bad, if not worse commutes (second worst congestion in the country in 1999.)

Here's the difference. When I went back to the DC area in 2005, I-95 and I-395 in Virginia had been dramatically expanded. New lanes, bridges, interchanges, overpasses, etc., had been added. I hardly recognized the roads I used to drive every day. Traffic is still horrible (fourth worst in the U.S. in 2005 according to the Texas Transportation Institute), but how bad would it be had they done nothing?

Meanwhile, virtually nothing has been done to improve SR 167 and I-405 in King County in the 12 years I have lived in Washington, despite rapid population growth.

As I said on the radio yesterday, like Ronald Reagan, I did not leave the Democratic Party, it left me. The Democrats used to be the party of the working man. The Democrats used to be the party of job- and business-creating public works projects, such as dams and bridges, that increased our quality of life and invested in the future. That is no longer the case, particularly in Washington. The Washington Democratic Party may as well be the Green Party. The interests of fish, trees, and snooty latte liberals have come before the interests of the working class.

What could be more important to working people than affordable housing? Yet the Growth Management Act, foisted on us by the Democrats, has made housing unaffordable statewide, particularly in the Puget Sound area. So if you can't afford to live close to work, then you have to commute. Again, the Democratic intransigence to do anything with the road system in the Puget Sound area has forced working people to spend more hours every day in their cars instead of with their families.

Why? Because the attitude is that if we build more roads, then more people will move to Washington. The Greens Democrats want to pull up the drawbridge and seal Washington off from the rest of the world to stop that evil "urban sprawl" (a myth, by the way) and force people into more environmentally-correct public transportation (even though cars stuck in traffic burn more gas and emit more pollution,) which is not practical for most working families. And that's okay with the elitist NIMBYists who want to keep their view of the Olympics uncluttered by tract housing.

The theory didn't pan out, however. Washington has continued to grow rapidly, despite the poor transportation infrastructure, and now the chickens have come home to roost. It's been nearly 20 years since the Nimitz Freeway collapse in Oakland and the Alaskan Way Viaduct still poses a serious risk of killing thousands. The 520 floating bridge likewise could sink in a strong windstorm, possibly killing hundreds. Needed replacement ferries are still on the drawing board. Boeing moved it's headquarters to Chicago. How many more businesses will move out of Washington because of long commmute times and a do-nothing government? We are in gridlock, literally and figuratively. And it affects us in Eastern Washington, because when the Puget Sound catches a cold, we get the flu. Tax dollars that should be going to our transportation needs end up on the west side instead. Remember the 9.5 cent gas tax hike that was supposed to fix all these problems? Yeah....

Rossi's ambitious plan, among other things, calls for the state to spend $15 billion (without raising gas taxes) on a tunnel to replace the Viaduct, widening I-405 from Renton to Bellevue (the road I used to drive every day), and replacing the 520 floating bridge with an eight-lane bridge. This is bold leadership. This is what government is supposed to be about. Come November, Washington voters are going to see the clear differences between Dino Rossi and Chris "Status Quo" Gregoire.

The Official Palousitics Song

There's been some discussion by the Blogfather about what would be a better campaign video for McCain in response to Obama's small-town smackdown: Bocephus' A Country Boy Can Survive or Trace Adkins' Songs About Me.

My vote is for Montgomery Gentry's You Do Your Thing, which I hereby declare to be the official Palousitics song.

No Doesn't Mean No to the Democrats

UPDATED: Thanks to April for pointing out the news article. You can find the link in the comments section. It turns out that this bill has died due to the public input! I guess some Democrats do listen, too bad, we have to be constantly vigilant of them so they don't slip this crud past us. I guess if they really listened we would not have even seen this ill proposed. -- Scotty
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No doesn't mean no when you're a West-side Democrat. Some years ago the people of Washington didn't want to pay hundreds of dollars each year for licensing tabs. So we now pay thirty bucks. But these Democrats: Rodney Tom - Bellevue/Redmond area, Jeanne Kohl-Welles - Seattle area, Craig Pridemore - Vancouver area, Karen Keiser - Kent/SeaTac area, Adam Kline - Seattle area have sponsored a bill that will add a "fee" not a tax onto your car based not on price, but engine size. The larger the engine the more it will cost. For my 1980 Toyota I will be paying around $100 a year. For my Dodge I will be paying around $360 a year.

Then in 2012 the new fee will go away to be replaced with a CO2 emissions "fee". But when you are compelled to pay something by the government, I would consider it a tax. Plain and simple.

I find it strange someone from Vancouver would support this. When you make someone pay $400 a year again for licensing tabs, he will again go to Oregon to get licensed. Those in this part of the state people will probably start licensing in Idaho again.

The money is supposed to go to "transportation" purposes only, but that is not clarified. So, I would guess, using other measures as a reference point, more than 1/2 of this money will go to putting mass transit in the Puget Sound region.

But the bottom line is that we, the citizens of Washington spoke. But the Democrats just don't listen.

See it for yourself:

Senate Bill 6900

Rossi Response to WEA Smear Campaign

Dino Rossi Must Scare the Living Hell Out of the Democrats

Because they have started to drag the teachers and kids into the race, and its only February. Listen to the WEA radio ad here.

Barack Obama - One Bad Somali Elder

Nothing is better than watching Democrats play the race card on each other.

Quote of the Day

He still hasn’t gotten over 2000.

- State Senator Mark Schoesler (R- Ritzville) on State Senator Eric Oemig (D- Kirkland). Oemig proposed awarding Washington's 11 Electoral College votes to the winner of the popular vote nationwide, versus the winner of the popular vote statewide. The proposal passed in the Senate and is on the way to the House for a vote.

Seattle Democrat: College Students Have Incomplete Brain Development

I wonder how many WSU students caught this in the Evergreen today:

Sen. Ed Murray, D - Seattle, the main proponent for SB 6841 [an act that would restrict possession of firearms at institutions of higher education - tf], argued that studies showing incomplete brain development until late teens or early 20s mean “many students do not have the ability to make judgements about guns.” Schoesler [our Republican senator - tf] disagreed, describing university students as having “the best and brightest minds,” and being capable of making good judgments.

Ironically, the majority of our young men and women in the armed forces who are making "judgements about guns" in Iraq and Afghanistan every day are in their late teens or early 20s. But what would a Seattle Democrat know about that?

That's right, students. The Rats think you're just kids, but go ahead and keep voting for the buffoons anyway.