STAR DRECK: EPA plans to shut down coal plants by requiring they use technology from the future that has yet to be invented

Mr. Peabody, does the Wayback Machine have a setting for the year 2030?

This past spring, EPA pulled its first attempt at a greenhouse gas emission standard for new power plants, fearing it was so draconian that it wouldn't stand up in a federal court...

The Washington Post reports that the agency is about to take a second stab at stacking the deck against new coal-fired power plants:

According to those familiar with the new EPA proposal, the agency will keep the carbon limit for large natural gas plants at 1,000 pounds but relax it slightly for smaller gas plants. The standard for coal plants will be as high as 1,300 or 1,400 pounds per megawatt hour.

However, the average coal plant emits 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour, meaning new plants will need carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology--something that is a long way from being viable. Jeffrey Holmstead, who represents coal-fired power plant owners and is a former EPA official in the President George W. Bush administration, told the Post, “As a practical matter, this means that the new proposal will still stop any new coal-fired power plants for the foreseeable future.”

The International Energy Agency doesn't expect CCS technology to be routinely used by power generators until 2030. That’s years away. In the meantime, we need to continue improving the efficiency of current coal-fired technology and continue investing in CCS research instead of writing off an abundant and economical energy source.

The only campaign promise that President Obama appears to have kept with was his 2008 pledge to make "electricity prices necessarily skyrocket".

"Under my plan of a cap and trade system, the price of electricity would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was... [t]hey will pass that money on to consumers." --Barack Obama, 1 November 2008

He can run, he can hide, he can evade, he can blame Bush and James Buchanan. But this is one campaign promise Barack Obama actually followed through with. And you. Ain't. Seen. Nothing. Yet.

No Wonder the EPA is Illegally Hiding Its Temperature Data

If the radical Leftists controlling the Democrat Party had even an iota of evidence suggesting the validity of global warming, they would be clamoring to make public its data. Instead, they are unlawfully concealing the data, violating Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests and other demands.

It would seem to be common sense for the data used in a study that guides public policy and the writing of federal regulations to be publicly available. That’s not the case when it comes to EPA and air pollution data.

As J.R. Reed explained on Free Enterprise in July:

During their pursuit of regulations that would cost businesses billions of dollars, EPA officials have refused to reveal the data used to support these proposals – not to White House officials, not to Congress, not to leading environmental experts, and not to the American people. The data sets have not been analyzed by independent scientists or gone through a peer-review process, and, yet, these findings are being used to justify onerous regulations.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the House Science Committee, sent six letters to EPA asking for the data. In 2011, current EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy promised to do so, but never delivered it. Rep. Smith subpoenaed the agency on August 1.

ScienceInsider reports that EPA continues refusing to turn over the requested data so, Rep. Smith found EPA in default:

“You did not provide the Committee with anything new,” Smith wrote in a letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. Instead, Smith wrote, the agency responded to his 1 August subpoena by providing “a file of already public information along with a letter outlining excuses for why EPA did not comply.”

In a statement, Rep. Smith explained,

EPA is using the subpoenaed data to support regulations that could cost the American people trillions of dollars. Yet the agency has refused to make the data available to Congress or the American people. Regulations based on secret data have no place in a democracy.

Ah, there's your mistake, Rep. Smith. We no longer live in a Constitutional republic, the kind in which a virtuous government does its best to hew to the letter of the law. Instead we have an out-of-control administration, with officials laced throughout the bureaucracy defying the courts and Congress.

As for "global warming"? Even the United Nations has been forced to confess the Earth is cooling.

Well, this is awkward. A leaked report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that the world is not warming but actually cooling, and will continue to get colder until the middle of the century.

You remember the IPCC, right? It’s the group whose 2007 report on global warming said that snow would disappear from everywhere but the highest mountains, icebergs would melt, sea levels would rise, deserts would spread, people would die in heat waves and pretty much the earth was going to end if we didn’t immediately destroy our carbon-fueled economy with job-killing government regulations.

Well, that’s not happening. In fact, the Arctic ice cap has grown by 60 percent since 2012.

Thanks to the IPCC’s original predictions, billions of dollars were spent on supposed green measures to curb global warming ... Now, either those measures really, really paid off, or the skeptics were right all along.

There are only three reasonable ways to explain a "belief" in global warming. In order of increasing malevolence, they are hubris, greed, and Marxism. And they are not mutually exclusive; see exhibit A: Al Gore.


Related: Global Warming Comics -- The Fraudulent And The Immoral. Hat tip: Weasel Zippers.

WHEN A PICTURE IS WORTH A BILLION WORDS: The Unvanished Idiocy of the Anti-Fracking Crowd

Spotted over at Anthony Watts's jaint.

There’s been a lot of hullabaloo in the UK over the Balcombe fracking protests. WUWT reader Eric Worrall writes in with this comparison photo...

...Here is a tagged version of the same picture of all the plastic high tech synthetics used by anti fracking protestors in England, captured in a single photograph...

It really makes you wonder – do anti-fracking protestors think nylon tents, PVC groundsheets, and plastics grow on trees? No doubt the tents also contain high tech synthetic fibre sleeping bags, and gas powered camp cookers.

Do these hypocrites actually think about what sort of world they would have to endure, without the cheap hydrocarbons, and cheap plastic synthetics, the petroleum source of which they oppose?

And these are the same kooks that tell us humans are causing "global warming" (or is it "climate change" now, I forget) even though the Earth is cooling?

These people are such simpletons I'm amazed they remember to breathe on their own.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

THE CLIMATE LIARS: Why would anyone believe a single word out of their mouths?

A brilliant post by Pointman:

Georges Clemenceau, the prime minister of France during WWI, famously remarked after yet another military disaster that war is too important to be left to the generals. In an analogous fashion, when a branch of science is being used to justify the complete restructuring of the global economy, it’s no longer a scientific issue but a political one.

More importantly, it’s the ordinary person who’s being asked to finance initiatives, which will lower their standard of living and significantly increase their tax burden for the coming decades. If you’re the one actually doing the paying, you very definitely want a say, even if you’re not a rocket scientist. He who pays the piper, gets to call the tune.

So, if global warming is too important to be left to the scientists, how can the ordinary person arrive at a reasonable judgement as to its validity? We all have our own way of getting to understand something and personally being a from first principles type of person, asking basic questions about it has always been mine. When it comes to people, meaning the climate scientists in this particular instance, I find the most revealing questions to ask usually begin with why, so let’s take that approach. The seemingly simple but difficult trick is to ask the blindingly obvious questions.

Why is it that every one of the cockups and blunders we uncover in their papers always err towards a warmer global climate?

Why do they persistently withhold the data on which their conclusions are based?

Why do they, in their own words, hide behind Freedom of Information laws, as a reason to keep such data hidden?

Why do they, in their own words again, hide behind Non-disclosure Agreements, as a reason to keep the data hidden?

Why are they so vague about the exact methods used on the data to derive their results?

Why do all their computer climate models run hot?

Why have they consistently overestimated the climate’s sensitivity to CO2?

Why don’t they ever design experiments attempting to disprove their theories?

Why do the Climategate emails reveal their deep private doubts about the science, which they’ve publically reassured everyone was settled?

If the science was so solid, why’d one of their number feel they had to resort to identity theft to discredit the opposition?

Why are they telling each other to delete emails to circumvent Freedom of Information requests?

Why do they feel they’ve got to “redefine the peer review process” to prevent dissenting science papers being published?

Why do they need to get science journal editors removed from their jobs because they dared to publish a dissenting paper?

Why, after being the beneficiary of billions of dollars of research funding in the last two decades, haven’t they by now proved their case beyond a reasonable doubt?

Why is anyone who simply questions the science being equated with a holocaust denier?

The list goes on and on and on.

Global warming is a massive fraud orchestrated by crony profiteers like Al Gore and One-World Government Marxists like -- well, his name rhymes with Robama.

Global warming is a massive fraud designed to redistribute wealth from you to them.

Global warming is a massive fraud, the scale of which has never before been seen on Earth.


Hat tip: James Delingpole.

In Obama's Chicago, a Trayvon Tragedy Occurs Every Day of the Week

Guest post by Investors Business Daily


Urban Decay: When more Americans are killed in the president's hometown than in Afghanistan, even the media take notice. When will the president notice the carnage in the city run by his former chief of staff?

People are dying fast and furiously in Chicago, so much so that it caught the CBS eye and prompted "Evening News" anchor Scott Pelley to sit down Monday night with Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's former chief of staff and mayor of this monument to progressive decay, and ask a very pertinent question.

"I got a letter from a viewer the other day who asked us why we were spending so much time at 'The Evening News' covering Afghanistan when more people were dying in Chicago," Pelley said. "Why is the murder rate up 30%?"

Pelley put the number of murders in Chicago at 275 so far this year. On Monday alone, nine young people were shot in suspected gang-related violence, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Emanuel responded that crimes such as burglary, armed robbery and theft are down 10%. This is true, but it's small comfort to the parents of Heaven Sutton, 7, who was killed as she tried to dodge bullets fired from the guns of gangbangers. She was selling snow cones at the time.

Heaven didn't get quite the attention of Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager killed by neighborhood watch member George Zimmerman. When perceived racism can be invoked as a cause of death, headlines blare. When it happens in a city beset by liberalism's failures, crickets chirp.

Mayor Emanuel announced Monday that he's devoting another $4 million to tear down vacant buildings where gang members live and store guns and drugs. Structurally sound buildings will be boarded up. But why are they vacant and boarded up? Why did 200,000 people flee Chicago in the past decade?

Chicago, like Illinois, is overtaxed and overregulated, a climate that attracts neither businesses nor people. It was the ideological incubator for a community organizer who would become president and blame all of America's problems on those who worked hard and succeeded.

Emanuel told Pelley that in addition to being a law enforcement issue, "it's about values. As I said then (when a 7-year-old Heaven was shot and killed last month), who raised you? How were you raised?" And by whom, we might add. Decades of progressive liberalism that started with LBJ's Great Society did much to destroy the black family in America.

Progressive liberalism does not teach the values of hard work and reaping the fruits of one's labor. It gives men fish instead of teaching them how to fish. It demeans the value of marriage by saying, "Don't worry, the government will be your parent," as generations of inner-city youth grow up without a father or male role model in the home.

The fact that African-Americans, with 12.6% of the nation's population, account for 50% of the murder victims just might have something to do with the fact that among blacks, 72% of births are to unmarried women. Yet President Obama focuses on gay marriages.

Mayor Emanuel and his former boss are all about redistributing wealth rather than creating it and fail to realize that no one ever got a job from a poor person. They embrace a cradle-to-grave, paternalistic liberalism that encourages dependence and discourages ambition, that puts food stamps above paychecks.

The black unemployment rate nationally jumped from 13.6% in May to 14.4% in June, with the jobless rate for black youths aged 16 to 19 increasing from 35.2% to 44.2%; yet President Obama says we are on the "right path."

Hope and change? In Barack Obama's liberal citadel of Chicago, there's little hope that anything will change anytime soon.

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BREAKING: Neanderthals Operated Coal-Fired Plants 120,000 Years Ago

I can only surmise that Neanderthals operated coal-fired power plants 120,000 years ago because the eco-Marxists keep telling us that cancer is caused by burning fossil fuels like coal. I wonder how the climatards -- which is the term they prefer to be called, I hear -- explain this report.

World’s Oldest Cancer Found in Bone of 120,000 Year-Old Neanderthal

The world's oldest known human tumour has been found in the rib bone of a Neanderthal who lived more than 120,000 years ago.

The bone was evacuated from a site in Krapina, Croatia more than 100 years ago and has been found to have contracted the fibrous dysplasia tumour, a cancer which is common among modern-day humans...

...Researchers said it is rare to discover evidence of cancer in the prehistoric population as they were not exposed to toxins, pollution, radiation and unhealthy diets over a long period of time which has been seen to cause cancer in today's humans.

Fibrous dysplasia in modern-day humans is the most frequent of the bone-tumours, but Frayer adds: "This case shows that Neanderthals, living in an unpolluted environment, were susceptible to the same kind of cancer as living humans."

Well, let's not let evidence, facts, history, logic and reason stop the de-industrialization of America. The overstuffed crook who uses the alias Richard Windsor needs to keep plenty of food on her table.


Hat tip: BadBlue Tech News.

CAPTION CONTEST: The Official Portrait of Richard Windsor, I mean Lisa Jackson, Which Only Cost You $40,000

Courtesy of Sean Hackbarth, who writes:

The EPA spent 40,000 of our tax dollars on this oil painting...


Begin...

Matt offers: "Thanks to Climosil, I feel fresher than ever."

CHART: Despite federal government, oil production booming in ND

In spite of a radicalized, lawless EPA, North Dakota's oil production is fracking booming:

It's no secret that North Dakota has been in the middle of an oil boom since about 2008, but a new chart from the North Dakota Industrial Commission, Department of Mineral Resources, shows just how steep the increase has been...


...As of 2006, the state was only producing about 100,000 barrels of crude oil per day, putting it on par with other mid-tier oil producing states like Kansas, Colorado and Montana. But new hydraulic fracturing techniques and the opening of the massive Bakken formation to drilling changed all that, and as of January 2013 the state was producing an average of 770,000 barrels of crude per day, for a total of 23,834,000 barrels per month. That's double the amount the state was producing just two years ago.

It is a lot of oil, to be sure, but even with this recent explosion in production North Dakota is in just third place nationally. Texas produces a staggering 2,220,000 barrels per day, and the rigs that operate in the U.S. Federal Offshore region account for another 1,389,000 barrels per day. North Dakota currently accounts for about 10% of all U.S. crude production.

And virtually all of this production is occurring in spite of the federal government. In fact, in 2012 alone, "oil production on federal land decreased by 11 percent."

It would appear that the EPA is -- now that the election is over -- bound and determined to stop fracking at all costs.


Hat tip: BadBlue Financial News Network.

Advanced Levity Commences as Global Warming Con Game Implodes

Every. Single. Prediction. Every single one by the Climatards (which is the term they prefer, I hear) has turned out wrong, but none as spectacularly as this:

No, the world isn't getting warmer (as you may have noticed)... [and] official predictions of global climate warming have been catastrophically flawed ... the ‘scientific basis’ for [reshaping the] economy and spending billions in taxes and subsidies in order to cut emissions of greenhouse gases...

Steadily climbing orange and red bands on the graph show the computer predictions of world temperatures used by the official United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The estimates – given with 75 per cent and 95 per cent certainty – suggest only a five per cent chance of the real temperature falling outside both bands.

But when the latest official global temperature figures from the Met Office are placed over the predictions, they show how wrong the estimates have been, to the point of falling out of the ‘95 per cent’ band completely...

The graph shows in incontrovertible detail how the speed of global warming has been massively overestimated. Yet those forecasts have had a ruinous impact on the bills we pay, from heating to car fuel to huge sums paid by councils to reduce carbon emissions.

...Academics are revising their views after acknowledging the miscalculation. Last night Myles Allen, Oxford University’s Professor of Geosystem Science, said that until recently he believed the world might be on course for a catastrophic temperature rise of more than five degrees this century... But he now says: ‘The odds have come down,’ – adding that warming is likely to be significantly lower... Prof Allen says higher estimates are now ‘looking iffy’.

...The graph confirms there has been no statistically significant increase in the world’s average temperature... Its source is impeccable. The line showing world temperatures comes from the Met Office ‘HadCRUT4’ database, which contains readings from more than 30,000 measuring posts. This was added to the 75 and 95 per cent certainty bands to produce the graph by a group that amalgamates the work of 20 climate model centres working for the IPCC.

...In the Seventies, scientists and policymakers were just as concerned about a looming ‘ice age’ as they have been lately about global warming – as the Time magazine cover pictured here illustrates... Temperatures had been falling since the beginning of the Forties. Professors warned that the trend would continue and food crises were going to get worse because of shorter growing seasons.

Newsweek magazine reported that evidence of cooling was so strong ‘meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it’. But, it lamented, ‘scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections’. It said the planet was already ‘a sixth of the way towards the next ice age’.

While recently every kind of extreme weather event has been blamed on warming, in the Seventies the culprit was cooling. One article predicted ‘the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded’, along with ‘droughts, floods, extended dry spells and long freezes’...

The recent leak of the Climategate 3.0 emails offers additional evidence that global warming is about as genuine as a mother-in-law's hug.

Not that any evidence would dissuade the lawless extremists at the EPA.

STUNNING PHOTOS OF POLLUTION IN CHINA: Could Someone Let the EPA Know About This?

As the EPA tries to micro-manage industrial policy in the United States using unlawful and impossible dictates, the world's worst polluter goes unmentioned in the U.S.:

In China, public anger over secrecy on environment

When China's environment ministry told attorney Dong Zhengwei he couldn't have access to two-year old data about soil pollution because it was a "state secret", it added to mounting public outrage over the worsening environment.

...The environment has already been one of one of the most frequently raised issues at the annual parliament session and China's authoritarian government has admitted it has a problem... China does not usually allow public scrutiny of governance, particularly on sensitive issues such as corruption and security. But public anger over the environment may force authorities to accommodate the public in small ways...


...A choking smog in Beijing in January, far above hazardous levels, has been one of the most dramatic signs of China's environmental problems, but Dong is convinced that soil pollution is the country's "silent killer." ... Citing "state secrets", the environment ministry last month denied a request from Dong for information on data on soil samples that was collected in a national survey that started in 2006 and ended in 2010.

...And just last month, the government acknowledged for the first time that pollution had given rise to "cancer villages", admitting that cancer rates in villages near factories and polluted rivers were far higher than they should be.

In short, while the EPA tightens the screws on America's already clean industries using flatly unlawful tactics, America's policy-makers ignore the elephant in the atmosphere.

New technology could drive zero-emission, clean coal-powered cars; Richard Windsor hardest hit

I wonder what the overstuffed radical named "Richard Windsor" thinks of this innovation?

New technological advances may make it possible in the near future to engineer a coal-powered car so clean that it produces nearly no polluting emissions, including carbon dioxide...

“There are many exciting possibilities for the clean coal technology,” says Liang-Shih Fan, a chemical engineer and director of Ohio State University’s Clean Coal Research Laboratory. “We found a way to release the heat from coal without burning it. This could be applicable for many industries.”

Fan last week disclosed that he had discovered a way to get the energy out of coal without burning it, using iron-oxide pellets as an oxygen source, and contain the reaction in a small chamber from which pollutants cannot escape. The only waste product would be water and solid coal ash -- no greenhouse gases. As an added benefit, the metal from the iron-oxide is recyclable.

The energy creation process is commonly known as “oxidation,” and is the chemical combination of a substance with oxygen. The use of the process is envisioned by Fan and his colleagues as a replacement for old-fashioned coal power plants, which spew greenhouse gases.

If the technology can be successfully miniaturized enough to fit into cars, the fueling infrastructure needed to service them would not be all that difficult to develop, experts say.

My question, above, was rhetorical, of course. We know what "Richard Windsor" and her ilk think of anything that empowers the individual and freedom of movement: they despise it.

For these sixties-retread radicals, it's not about carbon dioxide, or pollution, or global warming, or climate change, or whatever they're calling their religion these days. It's about control over you, the individual. Restricting your movement, controlling the private sector, and setting industrial policy.

As Mark Levin often says, "Green is the new Red."


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Feds: Jesse Jackson, Jr. Used $750,000 in Campaign Funds to Buy a Michael Jackson Fedora and Gold Jewelry, Wasted the Rest

Taste is, of course, highly subjective:

Former U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. was charged today with violating federal law by misusing $750,000 in campaign funds...

Federal authorities allege that Jesse Jackson used campaign funds to purchase a $43,350 men’s gold-plated Rolex watch, $5,150 worth of fur capes and parkas, and $9,588 in children’s furniture. The purchases were made between 2007 and 2009, according to the criminal information, which authorities noted is not evidence of guilt.

Other expenditures listed by prosecutors include $10,105 on Bruce Lee memorabilia, $11,130 on Martin Luther King memorabilila [sic] and $22,700 on Michael Jackson items, including $4,600 for a "Michael Jackson fedora."

The government also alleged that Jesse Jackson made false statements to the House of Representatives because he did not report approximately $28,500 in loans and gifts he received.

As they say, the nut doesn't fall far from the tree.


Hat tip: BadBlue News Service.

Smart Car: Driver killed after her micro-sized vehicle hits a... motorcycle

"Smart" isn't the brand name I'd use to describe a vehicle like this.

A woman who died in hospital after a collision between her car and a motorcycle in Surrey has been named as Freda Lawry.

The crash between the Smart car and the bike happened on 27 January on the A245 Byfleet Road in Cobham...

The motorcyclist, a man in his 30s, was taken to George's Hospital in Tooting, where he remains in a serious, but stable condition, Surrey Police said.

President Obama's mandate for vehicles to reach 54 miles-per-gallon over the next few years means that more people will needlessly die. And that's not me guessing, that's the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency.

In order for auto makers to hit the government imposed mileage standards new cars will have to lose weight. Strong metals like steel will be replaced with light weight metals or plastics. But while these cars of the future will get great gas mileage they will also have less bulk to protect drivers and passengers from injury or death in a crash.

...The NHTSA, Brookings Institution, Harvard School of Public Health, National Academy of Sciences and USA Today discovered a shocking reality. Even past and current mileage standards have resulted in thousands of additional fatalities, and tens of thousands of serious injuries, every year – above what would have happened if the government had not imposed those standards.

They also learned that drivers in lightweight cars were up to twelve times more likely to die in a crash – and far more likely to suffer serious injury and permanent disabilities.

Increasing mileage requirements by a whopping 19 mpg above current rules will make nearly all cars even less safe than they are today.

When President Obama says, in regards to gun control, "if we can only save one child," we know he's engaged in demagoguery.

Thousands die each year thanks to insane CAFE standards and Democrats could care less.

THE FUTURE OF OUR PROGRESSIVE UTOPIA: Wood-Burning Trucks

The Democrat Party's incessant drive to centralize more and more power in Washington, DC seems to have no limits.

Virtually every aspect of our lives is controlled within the Beltway, from the kinds of light-bulbs we can buy, the mileage our cars must get, how much electricity our washing machines can consume, and how much water can pass through our shower-heads. Worse yet, Democrats can't point to any blueprint that tells us when they'll be done centralizing power and authority.

If we need a model for where they're headed, it's got to be North Korea. All governmental power and industrial policy is centralized in one man. There are no separation of powers, there are no individual liberties, there are no checks and balances, and there's nothing protecting the individual from a lawless government.

Which leads me to this, the inevitable result of the EPA's warmal colding scam and its attendant war on oil:

...North Koreans [must] power their vehicles using gasifiers, which produce immense heat and break down biomatter, like wood, into a usable fuel. North Korea is just crawling with these mostly-wood-powered pickups and equipment haulers.

For decades, North Korea relied heavily on the USSR, China, and Iran to keep the cheap oil flowing. However, the USSR no longer exists, China seems increasingly displeased with North Korea’s behavior, and new sanctions have put the squeeze on Iranian crude. This has meant that many North Koreans must improvise when it comes to getting their old-school trucks moving. Wood is one of the few resources available in abundance in North Korea, and so it wasn’t long before the resourceful citizens (inspired by Dear Leader, of course) figured out that gasification was their only real solution.

Gasification has been around for a long, long time, first gaining widespread use after World War II. There are still people out there (and we do mean “out there”) who use gasifiers to power their rides, though it is far from an ideal situation as the burner must be feed a steady diet of wood in order to operate. They’re also loud, unreliable, and inefficient, but they work most of the time, and in North Korea, that is all that really matters

...It seems as though gasification will remain at the fringes of society for the foreseeable future, unless some worldwide calamity depletes our oil supplies overnight. Then all those wackjobs who predicted the end of the world might have something to celebrate, though one look at North Korea is a glimpse at just what such a world might look like.

And if the EPA has its way, gasifiers may be the only way to get around.

Like I said, the modern Left's endgame looks a lot like North Korea to me. Because the Democrat Party won't tell us when they'll have taxed enough, spent enough or regulated enough.

Which is precisely why you and I revere the Constitution and the strict limits it sets on government. And that is why the Left despises the Constitution; adherence to our nation's highest law prevents them from seizing all of the powers they desperately crave.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER SLAPDOWN FOR WHITE HOUSE: EPA slammed for mandating use of nonexistent biofuels

It seems like just yesterday that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit blasted President Obama's unprecedented act of claiming the Senate was in recess to place unpopular appointees on the National Labor Relations Board. Oh, that's right. It was just yesterday.

Slamming the administration in a blistering unanimous decision, Chief Judge David Sentelle wrote, "We will not do violence to the Constitution by ignoring the Framers’ choice of words."

Early this morning, The Daily Caller reports, another federal judge slammed the Obama EPA for mandating the use of nonexistent biofuels. Go figure.

A federal court delivered a serious blow to the Environmental Protection Agency’s renewable fuel agenda, ruling that the agency exceeded its authority by mandating refiners use cellulosic biofuels, which isn’t commercially available.

The court sided with the country’s chief oil and gas lobby, the American Petroleum Institute, in striking down the 2012 EPA mandate that would have forced refineries to purchase more than $8 million in credits for 8.65 million of gallons of the cellulosic biofuel. However, none of the biofuel is commercially available.

“[W]e agree with API that EPA’s 2012 projection of cellulosic biofuel production was in excess of the agency’s statutory authority,” reads the court decision...

The Obama administration is operating without any concern for the law. I believe that they have failed to consider the full implications of their behavior.

Lawlessness begets lawlessness. Which explains rallies like this one.

And signs like this.

If a president operates with reckless disregard for the law, why would the citizenry behave any differently?

CHART: America's Disappearing Fathers

Truly tragic:

In every state, the portion of families where children have two parents, rather than one, has dropped significantly over the past decade. Even as the country added 160,000 families with children, the number of two-parent households decreased by 1.2 million. Fifteen million U.S. children, or 1 in 3, live without a father, and nearly 5 million live without a mother. In 1960, just 11 percent of American children lived in homes without fathers...

The spiral continues each year. Married couples with children have an average income of $80,000, compared with $24,000 for single mothers.
“We have one class that thinks marriage and fatherhood is important, and another which doesn’t, and it’s causing that gap, income inequality, to get wider,”

...Though income is the primary predictor, the lack of live-in fathers also is overwhelmingly a black problem, regardless of poverty status, census data show. Among blacks, nearly 5 million children, or 54 percent, live with only their mother...

[One black father] is quick to blame the absence of fathers to deaths or incarcerations, though women point out that many absent fathers live around the corner...

The inconvenient truth? The "War on Poverty" and the Left's failed welfare state policies have decimated the two-parent family and ruined the lives of millions.

Of that, there can be no debate.

Richard Windsor Resigns as Head of EPA

Or is the name Lisa Jackson? I'm so confused.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson has decided to resign her post as top environmental regulator, a move that comes as Congress applies pressure on her for complicating oversight of the EPA by using at least one secondary email address under an alias.

...Lawmakers and the EPA inspector general wonder if Jackson used a private email account created under an alias to develop those policies in a way that would be invisible to watchdogs and congressional oversight...

...Jackson used a private email under the alias “Richard Windsor” to correspond with EPA colleagues, a decision her staff defended by saying that her official email account received too many messages for her to use it efficiently.

Her official email received too many messages?

Gee, I'm no Bill Gates, but I figure with 17,000 employees and an $8 billion budget the EPA could marshal the necessary brainpower to add a lisa.jackson2@epa.gov to their Exchange server.

Investors Business Daily summarizes the story as a question: "Is The EPA's Lisa Jackson Trying To Dodge A Federal Probe?"

Answer: of course she is. Just add this scandal to the list.

HARD TO KEEP UP WITH THE SCANDALS: EPA said to have broken law by using secret email accounts to hide radical agenda

At the rate this administration is going, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Kim Kardashian is involved in a secret love triangle with Jay Carney and David Axelrod.

I refer, of course, to the daily stream of scandals involving the Obama administration and its many tentacles. The latest shoe to drop, outside of the Benghazi-related sex scandals, is the unsurprising report that the EPA's top dogs have been routinely breaking the law for years.

The name Richard Windsor may sound innocuous, but it is allegedly one of the secret “alias” email accounts used by Obama EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

...In his book [“The Liberal War on on Transparency", author Chris] Horner revealed the existence of “alias” email accounts used by EPA administrators. The first such transparency dodge, he writes, came from Carol Browner, former director of the Obama White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy and Bill Clinton’s EPA administrator.

“You remember Ms. Browner, the lady who suddenly ordered her computer hard drive reformatted and backup tapes erased, hours after a federal court issued a ‘preserve’ order … that her lawyers at the Clinton Justice Department insisted they hadn’t yet told her about?... The one who said it’s all good because she didn’t use her computer for email anyway? That one.”

Horner said two former “fairly senior” EPA officials contacted him while he was researching his book, and gave him the name of one of the email alias names used by EPA Chief Jackson... “Richard Windsor” was just “[o]ne of the alternate email addresses she used...”

...“These alias accounts, from their origin and use under Browner to their use by Browner’s successor, are now the subject of a lawsuit..." [because] all government employees are required by federal law to use official email accounts to conduct government business...

Jackson, of course, is a hard left "eco-warrior" who has pushed the EPA to enact the most radical, anti-business regulations in American history.

And Horner asserts that other top officials are also using private email accounts to avoid Freedom of Information requests.

That Jackson would illegally hide her agenda from public scrutiny is precisely what we've come to expect from "the most transparent administration ever".

Not Trayvon: 'I don't want to go back with him'

Although highly relevant to the Trayvon Martin tragedy, you won't read this story in old media:

Ten-year-old Abdifatah Mohamud was running for his life down Sycamore Street at about 5 p.m. Tuesday when a concerned neighbor stopped to try to help. Seeing the boy's stepfather chasing after him, the neighbor helped the man, Ali Mohamed Mohamud, catch up with the child.

The boy didn't want to go home with Mohamud.

"I told the boy, 'Daddy promises nothing is going to happen,'" the neighbor later told The Buffalo News. "The boy said to me: 'No, he always says that.'"

Less than six hours later, Abdifatah was dead, brutally beaten, and his stepfather, Ali Mohamed Mohamud, was under arrest.

The boy was tied to a chair with duct tape, a sock stuffed in his mouth, and he was beaten with a stick or blunt object in the basement of their Guilford Street home, near the Broadway Market, authorities said... The stepfather was angry because the boy, a fifth-grader at the International Preparatory School on Clinton Street, had fallen behind in his homework...

...Mohamud, 40, a native of Somalia who has been in the United States for a decade, was charged with second-degree murder. Police investigators were shocked over the viciousness of the beating... "The defendant admitted he tied up his 10-year-old stepson, admitted that he put a sock in his mouth, put duct tape over the mouth and beat him to death with a stick or similar blunt object," Finnerty said.

And this story is simply too heartbreaking to use the all-too-suitable "Boy who could have been Obama's son..."

Pity the professional race-baiting scam artists -- Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson foremost among them -- won't be seen within 250 miles of this case.


Hat tip: Winterspirit.

Exclusive: Marion Barry Campaign Poster

Biff Spackle discovered this poster, which highlights Marion Barry's commitment to ethnic cleansing.

Remember: it's not racist unless Jesse "Hymietown" Jackson and Al "Diamond Merchant" Sharpton say so.