Progressive-Democrats Destroy Again

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This time they’re Illinois’ Progressive-Democrat governor, the inestimable JB Pritzker, and the State’s Party-dominated legislature. (The Wall Street Journal misattributed the fiasco to Pritzker, but even within Party, Governors need the complicity of Party’s legislative syndicate.) Following is from the Chicago Tribune, from which the WSJ quoted.

The owner of two-thirds of a massive natural-gas-fired power plant in Will County is moving their part of the facility to Texas.
Literally.
As in, putting huge turbines on flatbed trucks and driving them south to friendlier climes.
We’ve learned that two-thirds of the capacity at the 1,350-megawatt Elwood Energy facility—the largest natural-gas-fired peaker power plant in Commonwealth Edison’s territory and one of the biggest in the nation—now is being shut down thanks to Illinois’ landmark clean-energy law [Climate & Equitable Jobs Act] enacted in 2021. The sudden removal of that whopping 900 megawatts of capacity could well drive up local electric bills that already have been rising.

And this:

The remaining three units at Elwood will continue to operate at the site and now will be permitted to do so under the law until 2045. Why? Because the previous owner, J-POWER, sold those three units to Dairyland Power Cooperative, of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, which by virtue of being a nonprofit is allowed by CEJA to operate gas-fired power plants over the next few decades that otherwise would have to shutter in a few years.
So those emissions also will continue well into the future, but only because ownership changed from a private company to a nonprofit.
Yes, that’s how CEJA works. If you’re not a privately held gas-plant operator, you can continue to pollute.

This is far more than the empty virtue signal that the WSJ article suggested. This is the wanton foolishness resulting in destruction that Party is so enthusiastically pursuing for reasons only Party members can have a glimmer of understanding.

“The lady should always walk on the inside.”

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Like nearly all blanket, all-encompassing rules, this one is just dumba*. A letter writer recounted an anecdote from early in his relationship with his wife.

My wife and I were walking down 5th Ave. in Manhattan with her on the outside closer to the street while I was on the inside…. We passed a man who promptly chastised me: “The lady should always walk on the inside.”

The letter writer meekly complied, and he was wrong to do so; although, his error was not in his timidity in the face of the officious, self-important accoster.

When my wife and I go for our walks, significant parts of the walks are along a greenbelt frequented by bobcats and, occasionally, coyotes. The bobcats mostly leave humans alone, though they want watching with the same caution with which they watch us. Coyotes, though, are much more aggressive and often attack the humans they encounter.

When we’re along those greenbelts, we cross, and my wife walks on the outside, the street side, while I switch to the inside, the side toward the danger. That danger is small, but it’s larger than the danger from the street.

The letter writer should have similarly assessed the relative dangers and adjusted their walking sides accordingly. In an earlier time, the lady generally walked on the gentleman’s left so he could keep his sword hand free in order to draw promptly against a brigand. That sort of danger obtains today, also, even if it isn’t a sword that the gentleman, or the lady, is carrying.

A Thought on Income Taxes and Equal Treatment under Law

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It occurs to me that many of our States’ income tax codes violate our Constitution. Here’s the relevant clause, from the 14th Amendment’s Article I:

No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Any income tax law that taxes citizens differentially plainly does not afford all citizens equal protection of the (tax) law. Such laws confiscate the incomes of some people far more than it does others, and such laws that exempt some people from paying the tax favors those folks over others who must pay.

States’ income tax laws that do not tax every one equally must be found unconstitutional. That such a ruling would disrupt State budgets is no reason to continue this violation.

That principle applies, or should apply even if not strictly constitutionally, to our Federal income tax code, also. In particular, the 16th Amendment authorizes a Federal income tax, but it in no way authorizes the Federal government to tax Americans differentially from each other.

How Unfit is Unfit?

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UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer (Labour) is busily screwing the pooch. His latest failures are two, and both are related to his choice of Ambassador to the US.

For months, Starmer had insisted that his government followed “due process” in appointing Mandelson as US envoy, telling lawmakers repeatedly that Mandelson had been vetted and cleared by UK security services for the post.
On Thursday, it emerged that Mandelson had, in fact, failed his security clearance but was approved for the job anyway.

Then,

Starmer said Thursday he wasn’t aware Mandelson had failed his vetting process….

That Starmer blamed others for his ignorance and fired a scapegoat is neither here nor there against the enormity of his failures here.

The real upshot is that either Starmer has been lying through his…teeth…or he’s utterly incompetent. Either one alone demonstrates his unfitness for public office, much less for heading up the British government.

Parliament’s MPs shouldn’t be wasting time nattering on about how Starmer should resign. The MPs should simply dump him with a no-confidence vote. Absent that, they’re as timid, waffle-y, and incompetent or dishonest as Starmer.

Broken Windows Enforcement?

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The Trump Doctrine in progress. That’s Matthew Continetti’s thesis in his Free Expression piece, The Trump Doctrine in Action. His subheadline summarizes:

Major military operations in Venezuela and Iran make America, and the world, safer.

This is the mechanism for that increased safety:

Mr Trump cares less about a regime’s structure and ideology—whether it’s authoritarian or democratic, Chavista or Islamist—than its conduct. He cycles between negotiations and war, between economic punishment and military force, until he elicits the desired behavior.

Maybe, though, Continetti’s understanding doesn’t go far enough. Maybe what President Trump (R) is doing is this. Instead of taking on our peer and near-peer enemies directly—they are, after all, the most serious and direct threats to our nation’s sovereignty and freedom–he’s going after their satraps and clients, which weakens those enemies and limits their long-term and larger scale activities.

Is this broken windows enforcement on a nation-level scale? Broken picture windows enforcement, maybe? Or maybe hogwash. We’ll have to see over time whether Russia and/or the People’s Republic of China change their behaviors with the success of one window enforcement—Venezuela—the so far apparent success of another—Iran—and whether the next—Cuba—is attempted and, if so, successful.