Congress Taxes Oil and Gives It To Renewables
Thomas Nast’s cartoon depicting Boss Tweed and the Tammany Ring
You know what? I give up.
Declaring a new direction in energy policy, the House on Saturday approved $16 billion in taxes on oil companies, while providing billions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives for renewable energy and conservation efforts.[cite]
It should be patently obvious that taking money from one private party and nakedly giving it to other private party is incompatible with a government grounded in support of liberty. They used to call that ‘theft’ - not a ‘tax.’ Never mind the fact that renewables would receive plenty of money from the market, if the technology was viable.
Bridges: Society’s Menace
There are deadly killers in our midst. You pass by them on the way to school and on the way to work. They eye down at you when you’re driving on the highway. As they mature, the blood lust that brews inside of them boils over. All countrymen take heed and beware the murderous Bridge.
McCain Introduces the Immigration Flip Flop Act of 2007
I’ve gotten on John McCain for being a wimp compromiser and wearing unfashionable sweaters, well now it appears he’s altered his political course on immigration after he realized what a political disaster his old position was. The new bill he has introduced doesn’t provide for amnesty like his old bill that got shot down twice in the Senate.
It’s worth pointing out that, technically, he is still compromising his politics of compromise by not compromising. As a further side note, one of his latest co-sponsors is Lindsey Graham, one of McCain’s lackeys. Lindsey Graham has McCain’s central flaw: always wanting to be the center of attention by compromising (being liberal). Graham too was an avid supporter of the McCain-Kennedy Immigration reform bill, and has a compromise track record dating back to the Gang of 14. I digress.
If nothing else, McCain has gall. Here you have a Republican Senator who co-sponsors a wildly unpopular immigration bill with none other than Ted Kennedy. It fails a vote in the Senate in the midst of the 2008 political campaign, so he brings it for ANOTHER vote and loses - just to remind everyone how bad his ideas are. This causes him to lose alarming amounts of money in his campaign, fire key staff members, retire his tour bus, and regularly take rides to the airport from sympathetic supporters with flat tires. McCain in response: “I can out-campaign anyone,” and in top must-do-anything-to-become-president form, he introduces an immigration bill of the very type he did not support only weeks earlier. Did he think the move would be inconspicuous with the media affixed to his campaign like the Hindenburg?
Oh the humanity!
USPS Sick of Curbside Mailboxes
Photo: mail late again
It should come as no surprise that “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” is not the official creed of the United States Postal Service.
The latest news is that the USPS is flexing its power and has adopted a policy that all new residential developments are required to have cluster-box (apartment-style) units. This is ALL developments, including single-family homes. This means that normal subdivisions cannot have curbside mailboxes and developers will instead have to set aside land, build buildings, provide electricity for lighting, purchase the box itself, and integrate homeowners association covenants into deeds to provide for the community mailbox’s continued management.
New Report: Romney Bashing Addictive
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Romney is a socialist. Here’s a video of him offering broad support for stem cell research, though equivocally within “ethical lines.” Stem cell research is such a stupid debate. Who cares about the ethics? What right does the government have to take money from taxpayers and redistribute it to private companies to do research? Mitt’s apparent answer is that it will “stimulate the economy.” Genius.