The Democrat’s War on Cheap-Energy Coal Claims Another Scalp

It is now apparent that many of Obama’s promises were lies he never intended to keep, or didn’t care if he would keep.  Most have come with an expiration date, as Glenn Reynolds quips.  Consider, for example, “if you like your health care plan you can keep it.  Period;” or “One of the first things I’ll do as president is close the Guantanamo detention camp for terrorists;” or, “my administration will be the most transparent in history.”  But here’s one promise he’s keeping that I wish he wasn’t – putting the American coal companies out of business.

Obama’s plan to destroy the coal companies took a step forward yesterday when the largest American coal producer, Peabody Energy, filed for reorganization bankruptcy.  It’s just the latest coal company to do so.    

The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal.  True, some coal is relatively more polluting than natural gas or oil, but when burned with emission pollution scrubbers, already commonplace, the pollution is almost entirely eliminated.  So why the hate on coal from Obama and the Democrats?  It’s because it represents the cheapest source of energy for Americans.  The world-wide condemnation of coal is a tactic by global authoritarian elites, operating under the ruse of socialistic benevolence, to redistribute wealth from the Unites States to the Third World by making American energy more expensive.  But what people everywhere need, especially those in underdeveloped countries, is cheaper energy, and coal, burned with pollution scrubbers, can provide lots of that.   

Meanwhile, as they also harass the frackers who are making America oil-independent, Obama and the Democrats have poured taxpayer money into “green” energy companies, often run by connected, big Obama money-men and other Democrat cronies; some of those outfits, like Solyndra, have turned out to be over-hyped scams for profit.  And remember that not too long ago Al Gore, on the surface the anti-fossil-fuel crusader, sold his never-profitable, short-lived small cable TV operation for hundreds of millions to Saudi oil interests; the Saudis ran it a while as a show, then recently closed it down.  Well, who has a greater interest than the Saudis (and other Third-World oil producers like Obama’s socialist pals in Venezuela) in seeing the use of cheap coal in the US shut down?  As wise men and women know, whether looking at Al Gore or the Clinton Foundation, which rakes in scores of millions from dark-moneyed interests around the world – just follow the money. 

It’s all one big ruse, and a lot of rubes are still fooled.  

R Balsamo

The Decline and Fall of Us – Dispatch from Peggy Noonan

Ms. Noonan has gotten lots of things wrong in recent years, particularly her infamous support for Obama in 2008 after she became infatuated by the mirage of a man she had concocted of her own fantasies.  Recently she sobered up to write the following trenchant piece pointing out that modern intolerant progressives have pushed regular Americans to their limit, and have no idea of what the reaction might be:

There is something increasingly unappeasable in the left.  This is something conservatives and others have come to fear, that progressives now accept no limits.  We can’t just have court-ordered legalized abortion across the land, we have to have it up to the point of birth, and taxpayers have to pay for it.  It’s not enough to win same-sex marriage, you’ve got to personally approve of it and if you publicly resist you’ll be ruined.  It’s not enough that we have publicly funded contraceptives, the nuns have to provide them.  This unappeasable spirit always turns to the courts to have its way.

If progressives were wise they would step back, accept their victories, take a breath and turn to the idea of solidifying gains, of heroic patience, of being peaceable.  Don’t make them bake the cake. ... Leave the nuns alone.

Progressives have no idea how fragile it all is.  That’s why they feel free to be unappeasable.  They don’t know what they’re grinding down.   They think America has endless give.  But America is composed of humans, and they do not have endless give.

The Decline and Fall of Us – Dispatches from the Front Lines

Laugh or cry – or both?  At Indiana University, some students freak out when they mistake a Dominican priest in his white robes and long rosary for a KKK Klansman with a whip.  They don’t know what a priest and a rosary look like – ignorant enough of culture, religion, and history to be supporters of socialist Bernie Sanders.  The Dominican priest serves at the on-campus St. Paul Catholic Center, IU’s Catholic Church and student center.

There's no money in toilets.  Online payment-processor PayPal is cancelling a planned expansion in North Carolina because that state has a new law that basically says a person must use the toilet and shower room that corresponds to his or her genitalia, to prevent exposed adult males mixing with young girls, teens, and adult women who might not fully appreciate such a display.  Paypal standing up for the rights of transvestites to bare their genitals to members of the opposite sex!  Otherwise, discrimination!  Meanwhile, in what will be no surprise to any sentient being who's been paying attention, Paypal (like Apple [which is led by a gay man]) has centers in many countries that execute homosexuals (see link).  To sum up:  According to Paypal executing homosexuals is OK, but males have a right to be naked in girls’ locker rooms.  

Learning from the masters.  The California Attorney General is a supporter of and donator to Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States.  She has now sent "investigators" to raid and harass a film maker who recently helped expose Planned Parenthood’s practice of selling body parts from aborted babies to biotech research firms.  As one PP staffer said to one undercover filmmaker, livers are in real demand and will cost extra.  The AG has learned from the master, when Obama sent the FBI to arrest a Coptic Christian film maker who had made a short video critical of Islam on some pretense so he and Hillary had someone to blame for the muslim terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including the ambassador.    

Woman or man – what's the diff, really? (see above.)  Liberal Time Magazine, thinking it can fool the hoi polloi into thinking it’s an intelligent and high-brow source, proclaims Evelyn Waugh as one of the most-read female writers among college students.  Personally, I’ve much enjoyed his Brideshead Revisited, and the great miniseries film of it that made Jeremy Irons a star.

R Balsamo

Fighting African Elephants at the Field

On display in the Great Hall of Chicago's Field Museum since 1921.