In the Pipeline: 10/22/12

You know, this isn’t really a story of overreach, misjudgment and disappointment.  It is a story about stupidity, corruption, and the nascent fascism of an ever-larger government.  Oh, it is also a story about complacent and lazy media elites failing to do their jobs. NYTimes (10/18/12) reports: “The period around 2003 was the golden spring of green technology. John McCain and Joe Lieberman introduced a bipartisan bill to curb global warming. I got my first ride in a Prius from a conservative foreign policy hawk who said that these new technologies were going to help us end our dependence on Middle Eastern despots. You’d go to Silicon Valley and all the venture capitalists, it seemed, were rushing into clean tech… From that date on the story begins to get a little sadder.”

Speaking of which, we wonder if David Brooks is ‘sad’ that his tax dollars are paying for people to play cards at a federally funded electric car battery plant.  Must be a hard swallow to realize the ‘golden spring of green technology’ has just been a poker game all along, and the government stacked the deck against the American people. Washington Examiner (10/19/12) reports: “Workers at a Michigan electric car battery making firm that got millions of federal economic recovery funds have so little to do that they sit around playing cards, watching movies and reading magazines according to a local television news report.”

EPA says that the new automobile mandates will raise the average price of a car by 3200 dollars.  That it will price 6 to 7 million people out of the new car market.  That to realize any economic advantage at all, the price of gasoline will have to be $6.00 per gallon for the life of the car.  The National Academy of Sciences has said that the last round of mandates resulted in as many as 2500 deaths a year.  Other than that, we think this is a great idea. NYTimes (10/20/12) reports: “Yes, the costs for cars with higher miles per gallon will rise a touch, but the savings will be manyfold that amount. The Environmental Protection Agency projects families will save $1.8 trillion in fuel costs and reduce oil consumption by 2.1 million barrels per day by 2025, which is equivalent to one-half of the oil that we currently import from OPEC countries every day.”

The reason why people hate Washington?  Because it is jammed with hypocrites. Cryptome (11/12/08) reports: “Friedman explains his own ecological circumstances – geothermal heating, solar panels – he invites readers…to regard his real-estate move as an act of rescue…which could sound like someone buying a lot of champagne to protect society from cork-related injuries.”

Fred Siegel is right.  But George McGovern was still a great American (35 combat missions in WWII). ArgusLeader.com (10/21/12) reports: “To critics, McGovern’s rise helped polarize the nation’s political institutions. His ascendancy in 1972 expressed the polarization that emerged in the 1960s over Vietnam, race riots and the civil rights movement, said Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative think tank, and a scholar on American liberalism.”