Monthly Archives: May 2023

Not Her Fault—Not Entirely

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President Joe Biden’s (D) Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is being eviscerated for declaring, at a recent noon o’clock press conference, that illegal immigration was down by 90% since implementing President Biden’s immigration policies.

This is, of course, a straight up lie. While illegal immigration rates are down year-on-year, they’re nowhere near 90% down.

This is not Jean-Pierre’s lie, though; it’s Biden’s lie. The woman is only repeating the words she’s instructed to spout by her boss.

Jean-Pierre does, though, lack the personal integrity to resign rather than repeat her boss’ lies. She can, and should, be eviscerated for having so little personal integrity, while at the same time she should be deeply pitied for being so disturbingly lacking in self-respect.

A Better Solution

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Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) is reintroducing his energy project permitting reform bill in the Senate. He also re-cited the need for reform in his remarks introducing the bill.

In the United States, it often takes between five and ten years—sometimes longer—to get critical energy infrastructure projects approved, putting us years behind allies like Canada, Australia, and more recently the EU, who each have policies designed to complete permitting in three years or less[.]

Even though fixing this would help allegedly green energy projects, also, Manchin’s cronies in the Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate have been happy to sacrifice that in favor of letting those interminable delays kill so many domestic cheap hydrocarbon-based energy projects. It’ll be an up-the-cliff battle to get anything like this passed in the Party-dominated Senate.

Among the useful things in Manchin’s bill, though, is this:

The Building American Energy Security Act would establish maximum timelines for permitting reviews including a two-year process for major projects and a one-year process for smaller projects. It would provide legal avenues for project developers to take against the federal government if a permitting review is delayed beyond set timelines and would mandate a single inter-agency environmental review.

That’s good as far as it goes, but here’s a better enforcement mechanism, IMNSHO: the permits should be will-issue, and if no decision is reached by those deadlines, the project should be deemed fully permitted, with no further review and no appeal of the permit. Rejections must be public, specific, and detailed, and they can be appealed directly to Federal courts: the Energy and Interior Departments, EPA, any other government entity can appear only as defendants in an appeal; no appeal of a permit grant should be allowed.

A further criterion and an additional deadline: if any of the rejection criteria are not met, the project should be deemed fully permitted, with no further appeal. The rejecting authority should have gotten it right the first time.

If the initial court does not reach a final decision within six months, the project must be deemed fully permitted. Appeals must be finally resolved within three months of the appeal filing (which itself must occur, fully developed, within one week of the lower court’s ruling, or the opportunity to appeal must be forfeit), or the project must be deemed fully permitted. And: only one appeal of a permit grant must be allowed at each court level; naysayers cannot be allowed to drag things out with serial appeals.

Those last put a premium on the Federal courts moving cases apace, but it puts a bigger premium on the lawyers to prepare and move their cases without delays—and eliminates the deliberate stalls represented by cynical serial appeals.

“Dangerous and inhumane”

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That’s soon-to-be-ex-Mayor of Chicago Lori Lightfoot’s (D) plaint to Texas Governor Gregg Abbott (R) over his bussing illegal aliens to Chicago.

But I beseech you anyway: treat these individuals with the respect and dignity that they deserve. To tell them to go to Chicago or to inhumanely bus them here is an inviable and misleading choice.

She also cried, as paraphrased by Fox News, that

the city has been responsible for the care of more than 8,000 people who had no resources of their own since the first buses arrived from Texas in August—adding that the number continues to grow.

All 8,000 of them. In nine months. That’s a fraction of the number of illegal aliens that cross the Texas border every week. Lightfoot knows this. Lightfoot knows, also, that those illegal aliens volunteer to go to Chicago (or they volunteer to go to New York City, to which they’re sent at Texas taxpayer expense, or to…); they’re not forced in any way.

No, what’s dangerous and inhumane is Lightfoot’s conscious decision to make Chicago a sanctuary city and then choose, further, to do nothing to treat those illegals, or even to prepare to treat those illegals, who take her up on her invitation with the respect and dignity, and safety, that they were promised by her.

If Chicago is unsafe for the openly invited illegal aliens that trickle in, it’s because Lightfoot has made the parallel deliberate decision to do nothing to keep anyone in the city safe, to instead reduce the police force’s ability to act against crime, large or small, and to support Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’ decision to not bother to prosecute a broad range of crimes.

If Lightfoot were serious, she’d have set up facilities to receive that small trickle of illegal aliens. And she’d have created a safe city environment for everyone, including those illegal aliens.

Reporters’ Contempt for Ordinary Americans

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High-profile media figures gathered for their 2024 Campaign Journalism Conference at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics a week or so ago. One theme of the conference was the journalists’ concern about the perception of condescension, of looking down your nose at us Americans that we Americans have of the journalism guild and its members.

CNN journalist Jeff Zeleny was one expressing that concern.

So one thing I think the media has done incorrectly in terms of describing Trump voters as interviewing people only after Trump rallies. The vast majority of Trump voters have never gone to a Trump rally, have never, you know, stood in line for hours and hours and hours. And for those of you who’ve covered Trump rallies, you’ve seen some of the same people at rally, after rally, after rally. These are groupies. These are people who are going for the show, for the rock concert, if you will. So I think talking to voters who are interested enough and following things along, but not as obsessed with, you know, the candidate on either side that it sort of tends the view.

Some of those some of the people do attend multiple Trump rallies because they’re groupies interested in the show. An unknown number of them, even unknown by the august Zeleny. Many more, though, attend multiple Trump rallies, not because they’re obsessed, but because they are interested enough and following things along, and want to hear things straight from the horse’s mouth. And they—we–can’t trust the media to present his rallies honestly and with balance. Zeleny chose to claim the one set of frequent attendees were the whole of the frequent attendees, completely ignoring even the possibility of the other set’s existence.

And this bit by Ana Ceballos of The Miami Herald:

…DeSantis never made “small talk” with reporters….

He won’t hobnob with reporters. What a precious whine. More seriously: why would he make “small talk” when journalists are just going to print some of those off-the-record small talk remarks whenever those remarks are convenient to the journalists’ predetermined narrative, all the while attributing them to leaks by “a person familiar with the exchange” or a “high official?”

(Aside: there was a time when editors required at least two on-the-record sources to corroborate anonymous “person familiar” or “high official” claims. Editors have long since walked away from that standard. What concrete, measurable, publicly available standard of journalistic integrity do editors use today?)

Ceballos went on, on the subject of a claimed desire to build trust of the journalist by the staffer and/or politician:

They [DeSantis’ staffers] don’t often get on the phone, either, because they want everything in writing just in case they can attack you for it. So it’s really difficult to even have candid conversations with them and just an on-background, off-the-record conversation.

Yeah. It couldn’t possibly be because they need the written record so they can defend themselves or their administration when journalists leak and distort the on-background, off-the-record remarks in order to attack them. Trust goes both ways.

A canonical example of that lack of trustworthiness, that deliberate distortion, that contempt for us in thinking we’re too grindingly stupid to decide for ourselves how to interpret what we hear, is in their presentation of Trump’s Asheville, NC, speech late in his 2016 campaign. “Journalists” covering the speech, and others merely repeating what their fellows wrote, accurately quoted Trump as saying that there were “good people on both sides of the argument.” But the lie, and the contempt for us inherent in their lie, was in the “journalists'” decision to strip off the context of Trump’s remark and to claim that Trump was talking about the rioters that rioted. Even a casual perusal of the transcript of that speech—unneeded by all those who were present and heard what Trump actually said—demonstrates that far from drawing equivalence regarding the rioters, Trump was plainly talking about the debate over whether certain statues should be torn down or relocated.

The attendees at the Campaign Journalism Conference also seem to have ignored the press’ penchant for rewriting history to attempt to erase their past distortions when they’re caught out. News outlets routinely rewrite headlines when their inaccuracies are exposed, doing it on the sly without fanfare, expecting that we’re too stupid to notice. They do the same with later-exposed errors in the body of their articles, and for the same reason. This is nothing but naked revisionist history that would make any propagandist proud. The honest, the respectful, thing for these outlets to do would be to acknowledge their errors with the same prominence in which they made them and print their correction—their errata, if you will—at the head of the article in which the error was made, while leaving the article and headline otherwise intact.

One more item the conference attendees seem to have ignored: The New York Times‘ front-page announcement during Trump’s 2016 campaign that there should be no more objectivity in news reporting vis-à-vis Trump; journalists should take sides. This was followed by a broadcast news media anchor claiming in all seriousness that there are not two sides to every story. Only one side, very often, was fit to be presented.

The “news” media mavens’ contempt for us ordinary Americans is no perception. They really are contemptuous of us. Zeleny put that on clear display; so did Ceballos. These “journalists,” in their oh-so-much-smarter-than-us obliviousness, their breathtaking thin-skinned-ness, can’t even recognize the contempt they have for so many Americans in their own remarks. This is reminiscent of a politician’s claim that millions of Americans are irredeemable and deplorable. And of another politician’s claim that 15% of us are just no good.

This is what passes for journalism today. This is the actual contempt for us that journalists have.

A Step in the Right Direction

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But it’s a small step, and much more needs to be done. A bill has moved through the Texas legislature—it’s now on Governor Greg Abbott’s (R) desk—that would create a $200 annual registration fee for battery vehicles.

State Senator Robert Nichols (R), who sponsored the bill in the Senate:

As more of these vehicles drive on Texas roads, there are concerns about how they contribute to the funding of the roads which they use. Currently, Texas uses the gasoline/diesel fuel tax to fund transportation projects; however, with the growing use of EVs, the revenue from the fuel tax is decreasing, which diminishes our ability to fund road improvements for all drivers.

That’s a necessary step in maintaining funding for Texas’ roads and bridges, but it’s insufficient because wear and tear of our roads and bridges isn’t the only cost imposed on us by battery vehicles.

Battery vehicle owners also should be the only ones to pay for the environmental damage their vehicles inflict on Texas’ land. Battery vehicle batteries, at their end of life, cannot be recycled; they can only be “disposed of.” Major components of those batteries, like lithium, cobalt, and nickel are enormously toxic, requiring the dead batteries to be carefully disposed of, lest that environmental damage get widespread.

Serious environmental damage also occurs at the beginning of the battery production cycle, even if much of that start damage doesn’t occur in Texas: mining lithium, cobalt, and nickel, along with copper, is even more environmentally damaging than battery disposal, from the destruction caused by the mining itself to the highly toxic mining waste byproducts—tailings—that are thrown off by the mining.

Much, if not most, of the lithium, cobalt, and nickel mining, along with a significant fraction of the increase in copper mining, is done for the sake of these batteries. The only ones who should be paying these environmental costs are the battery car owners. No one else.

Battery car owners are getting off light under this fee.