Full Bullworth: Obama Set to Announce Killing the Keystone Pipeline, Jacking Up Electricity Rates
— Ace

@johnekdahl notes the "Full Bullworth" promise -- Obama told a New York Times reporter a month or so ago that he sometimes wished he could just go "Full Bullworth" and tell the American people How It Really Is.

Well, this isn't the Full Bullworth, but it could be called the Modified Limited Hangout Bullworth.

First, killing Keystone. And I do mean killing.

President Barack Obama will ask the State Department not to approve the construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline unless it can first determine that it will not lead to a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions, a senior administration official told The Huffington Post. Â…

The new Obama policy somewhat splits the difference — not killing the project outright, but ensuring that it meets a basic environmental standard. …

No, that is killing the project outright. Any action that makes it more efficient, more economical to use fossil fuels will, by necessity, cause more of them to be burned, and this in turn will cause more carbon emissions. The whole point of the pipeline is to bring Canadian oil to American markets.

Rather than announcing this decision himself, he pawns it off to a third party who can take the heat while he once again pretends to have nothing to do with his own government.

Cowardly, as usual.

But you'll also be happy to know that the Empowered EPA will be going Bullworth on your electricity rates.

Mr. Obama on Tuesday will sign a presidential memorandum directing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to start engaging with states, the private sector and other stakeholders to set carbon pollution standards for both new and existing carbon power plants.

The president, a senior administration official said, has “made it very clear his preference would be for Congress to act.” At this point, however, he is ready to rely on the existing authorities in the executive branch.

Â…

Go to Hot Air if you're unconvinced this will hit your pocketbook.

Yes, I just said you carry a pocketbook. What are you going to do about it, Sissy?

Posted by: Ace at 09:52 AM | Comments (455)
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South Korea Reports Widespread "Digital Dementia," An Internet-Caused Cognitive Impairment With Symptoms Similar to Those of Head Traumas
— Ace

Hey I was just talking about this and reading about this.

Via @comradearthur, the latest meme in medicine.

[Overuse of cellphones and the internet] is now developing into the early onset of digital dementia – a term coined in South Korea – meaning a deterioration in cognitive abilities that is more commonly seen in people who have suffered a head injury or psychiatric illness.

"Over-use of smartphones and game devices hampers the balanced development of the brain," Byun Gi-won, a doctor at the Balance Brain Centre in Seoul, told the JoongAng Daily newspaper.

"Heavy users are likely to develop the left side of their brains, leaving the right side untapped or underdeveloped," he said.

The right side of the brain is linked with concentration and its failure to develop will affect attention and memory span, which could in as many as 15 per cent of cases lead to the early onset of dementia.

Sufferers are also reported to suffer emotional underdevelopment, with children more at risk than adults because their brains are still growing.

The upside is that adults and especially kids who retain the capability of deep concentration have a major edge on the competition.

In further Brave New World news, Buzzfeed notes that author J.G. Ballard predicted the basics of a technology-based culture of narcissism in the 70s.

Okay, he didn't really nail the specifics, but he did predict the dissolution of real ("meatspace") social bonds in favor of the unreal.

Posted by: Ace at 09:20 AM | Comments (171)
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Obama Now Putting Out Trailers to Hype His Upcoming Speeches
— Ace

Obama's Big Climate Change Speech drops today. Video under the fold, and check out Ross Douthat's column, excerpted at Hot Air, about Obama's relentless focus on Lifestyle Liberal issues while he ignores the ones most people actually care about.

After all, gun control, immigration reform and climate change arenÂ’t just random targets of opportunity. TheyÂ’re pillars of Acela Corridor ideology, core elements of Bloombergism, places where Obama-era liberalism overlaps with the views of Davos-goers and the Wall Street 1 percent. If you move in those circles, the political circumstances donÂ’t necessarily matter: these ideas always look like uncontroversial common sense.

Step outside those circles, though, and the timing of their elevation looks at best peculiar, at worst perverse. The president decided to make gun control legislation a major second-term priority Â… with firearm homicides at a 30-year low. Congress is pursuing a sharp increase in low-skilled immigration Â… when the foreign-born share of the American population is already headed for historical highs. The administration is drawing up major new carbon regulations Â… when actual existing global warming has been well below projections for 15 years and counting.

An Obama advisor has declared that while Obama won't be so straightforward to mention a War on Coal, "a War on Coal is exactly what's needed." He really said that.

In line with a summer tentpole movie release, Obama has already released the speech to friendly critics-- liberals like those at CAP, which is sort of the Ain't It Cool News of Transnational Progressivism.

You gotta watch the "Redband Speech Trailer" below. The piano tinkle, an insipid theme vaguely suggesting Hope and Change, is a micro-commercial jingle designed to stick in your head.

It's all about branding. Not so much about governing.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:27 AM | Comments (249)
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Putin: Nyet, We're Not Extraditing Snowden
— Ace

I'm not sure why Obama would publicly make a demand he should have known would be refused.

Although my sneaking suspicion is that Obama doesn't want Snowden extradited. The politics of an arrest and prosecution would be too dicey, given his spying on AP and James Rosen.

And yet he's supposed to prosecute Snowden. So maybe he's making public demands for Snowden in hopes they'd be refused.

This occurred to me when Alan Derschowitz suggested that Snowden shouldn't be charged with anything more than simple theft, in order to reduce the justification for a foreign country to refuse extradition. He specifically did not think Snowden should be charged with espionage or treason -- not if we actually wanted our request entertained.* But late Friday night, the news was leaked Snowden was being charged with treason.

Maybe I'm giving him too much credit. Maybe he's just not very good at presidentin'.

Russian President Vladimir Putin says that National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden is in the transit zone of a Moscow airport and will not be extradited to the United States.

Putin said that Snowden hasn't crossed the Russian border and is free to go anywhere.

* By the way, I don't understand how Derschowitz' gabit was imagined to be useful. It's not like the Chinese or Russians wouldn't have realized the real charge underlying the stated one.

Posted by: Ace at 07:54 AM | Comments (195)
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SCOTUS Strikes Down Key Parts Of the Voting Rights Act
— DrewM

States and local governments that previously had to have the Department of Justice "pre-clear" changes to election laws/procedures due to past discrimination no longer have to.

For example, SC had to get DoJ approval to institute voter ID laws. Not any more.

What the Court seems to have done is not strike down the idea of "pre-clearance"(Section V of the VRA) directly but Section IV, which sets out the formula for determining whether a locality is covered under the "pre-clearance" requirement. Congress used very old voting data when they last reauthorized the VRA in 2006. It seems the Court is saying Congress needs to use better data.

Expect a big fight on this in Congress and lots of cries of RACISM!

Added: From the ruling (pdf)

...The Fifteenth Amendment is not designed to punish for the past; its purpose is to ensure a better future. To serve
that purpose, Congress—if it is to divide the States—must identify
those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in
light of current conditions.

(3) Respondents also rely heavily on data from the record compiled by Congress before reauthorizing the Act. Regardless of how
one looks at that record, no one can fairly say that it shows anything
approaching the “pervasive,” “flagrant,” “widespread,” and “rampant”
discrimination that clearly distinguished the covered jurisdictions
from the rest of the Nation in 1965. Katzenbach, supra, at 308, 315,
331. But a more fundamental problem remains: Congress did not use
that record to fashion a coverage formula grounded in current conditions. It instead re-enacted a formula based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relation to the present day.

Roberts wrote the opinion and was joined by Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito.

I agree with the outcome here but the logic of the decision is something conservatives should be very wary of. Essentially the Court is saying this is a legitimate exercise of Congress' power under the XV Amendment but they didn't like the method and data Congress used. I don't think it's the role of the Court to tell the people's elected representatives what data they may and may not use in the exercise of their authority.

I'm open to revisiting this conclusion after reading the whole decision but my initial skim of it makes me think this is the kind of judicial activism conservatives usually protest against for good reason.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:23 AM | Comments (395)
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Tuesday Morning News Dump
— Pixy Misa

• Chicago Blackhawks Won The Stanley Cup Last Night
  
• Immigration Rights Activist Robbing Banks Americans Refuse To Rob
  
• The Immigration Bill Is Everything That's Wrong With Washington
  
• Bloomberg Spending NYC Tax Money On Anti-Gun Lobbying In Nevada
  
• Clarence Thomas Continues His Long War On Affirmative Action
  
• John Bolton Touring Primary States
  
• The Most Unsustainable Countries In The World Are All Concentrated In Africa
  
• No, Liberal Groups Were Not Targeted By The IRS
  
• If Only Our Foreign Enemies Were Republicans
  
• In Defense Of Paula Deen
  
• Be Sure To Check Out SCOTUS Blog For Today's Decisions
  
• Obama Climate Clown: "A War On Coal Is Exactly What We Needed"
  
• AR-15 Prices Falling Back Down To Normal Levels
  
• NFL Might Promote Obamacare Enrollment
  
• Kelo Still Empty
  
• Company Sells Pork Laced Bullets
  
• Details Of Snowden's Hong Kong Stay
  
• The No Die Zone
  
• The Tragic Story Of The Iron Sheik
  

Follow me on twitter

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:35 AM | Comments (172)
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Top Headline Comments 6-25-13
— Gabriel Malor

Happy Tuesday.

Survey finds 76% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck.

The President, still in search of a topic change, will today give a speech about global warming. He's going to sidestep Congress and crack down on power plants via the EPA.

The IRS reported yesterday that an IRS investigation has cleared the IRS of intentionally targeting conservatives because, IRS says, it also had progressive groups on its BOLO list. Of course, observes David Freddoso, that's garbage that ignores the difference between 501 c(3)s and 501 c(4)s. There's no evidence that liberal groups faced harassment like conservative ones.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court issued six decisions, including a disappointing punt on the issue of affirmative action in college admissions. Five decisions remain in the term and the high court will issue at least one and possibly all of them this morning at 10am.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:48 AM | Comments (288)
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Overnight Open Thread (6-24-2013)
— Maetenloch

Michael Hastings, Obama, and the Swoon

Before he died in a car crash Michael Hastings published a book earlier this year detailing his experiences on the 2012 campaign trail including this description of an off-the-record session with reporters and Obama:

"The behavior of the assembled press corps was telling. Everyone, myself included, swooned. Swooned! Head over heels. One or two might have even lost their minds," Hastings writes, as each reporter had a chance to speak personally with the president. "We were all, on some level, deeply obsessed with Obama, crushing hard, still a little love there. This was nerd heaven, a politico's paradise, the subject himself moving among us - shaking our hands, slapping our shoulders!"

And Neo-neocon points out that this swooning says as much about the limited worldview and relative youth of modern professional reporters as it does about Obama's unique charm.

It's a dangerous phenomenon. I believe that Obama understands it and cultivates it, too. And no, I don't think it's actually hypnosis, although it works in some powerfully suggestive manner. It also takes advantage of the fact that so many journalists today are very young writers (like Hastings) who have done almost nothing else for a living, and so they seem especially susceptible. In the mid-20th century, reporters for major publications used to be uniformly older and to have had more varied prior experience in life and the world-more hard-boiled and hard-nosed, and less susceptible to swooning hero worship, although they were hardly immune to respect and liking.

more...

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New York City's Special Council Registered as a Paid Lobbyist on Behalf of Bloomberg's 501c MAIG in Nevada
— JohnE.

What's going on here?

Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that Michael Bloomberg had ramped up his gun control activism and started pressuring state governments to pass laws expanding background checks, among other measures.

CARSON CITY, Nev. — John W. Griffin is a fast-talking, whiskey-loving, fifth-generation Nevadan who spends his days as a lobbyist courting lawmakers in Stetsons. He advocates for luxury casinos, once brokered a dispute between a brothel and a nightclub, and has helped feuding families resolve tussles over cattle crossings.

Now he is representing the ultimate city slicker, Michael R. Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, who, undaunted by defeat in Congress, is taking his campaign for stricter gun laws to the nationÂ’s state capitals, including here, where a bill to expand the use of criminal background checks is before the State Legislature.

On Friday, after responding to my initial report on Mayor's Against Illegal Guns' use of New York City's government servers for their website and domain, Bloomberg's Press Secretary Marc La Vorgna pushed back with this:

Bloomberg spokesman Marc La Vorgna emails, saying Mayors Against Illegal Guns is not "a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization," as this article originally stated.

The group's "action fund" -- a separate entity -- is the 501(c)(4). But, as Haberman and Friess note in Politico, "The overlap between BloombergÂ’s groups and the city are evident throughout the registration information for several of the websites associated with them."

In Nevada, Bloomberg set to influence a background check bill by registering and paying 13 lobbyists. As you can see here, they were lobbying on behalf of the Mayors Against Illegal Guns Action Fund. This is the 501(c)(4) entity, not the 501(c)(3) one according to Press Secretary La Vorgna.

One of the paid lobbyists registered in Nevada was Christopher Kocher, who is (according to his LinkedIn profile), Director of Outreach and Special Counsel at Office of the Mayor of New York City.

It appears as if Bloomberg is paying an employee of the city (Special Counsel, no less) to lobby on behalf of his 501(c)(4) from that action fund, which last week was claimed to be entirely separate from the 501(c)(3) which was using the city's servers.

A couple questions:

1. How is this ethical?

2. How is this legal? It's possible it could be, but it certainly doesn't seem right.

I had trouble confirming last night that Christopher Kocher was still an employee, but it appears to be the case, as Maggie Haberman of Politico reports.

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Climate Scientist: If Temperatures Continue to Remain Flat for Five More Years, Our Models Will Have Been Disproven
— Ace

Interesting interview with a climate scientist digested at Breitbart, found in full at Der Spiegel.

He isn't calling quits on global change claims yet-- but, for once, he does offer a firm falsification scenario. He says that in 2% of all runs of all models, a 15 year pause in global warming was found. That is, the current span of a 15 year warming hiatus is not impossible in the models, it's just very rare.

But if it goes on five more years, the models will have been disproven, as a 20 year hiatus appears in none of them.

SPIEGEL: What could be wrong with the models?

Storch: There are two conceivable explanations -- and neither is very pleasant for us. The first possibility is that less global warming is occurring than expected because greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have less of an effect than we have assumed. This wouldn't mean that there is no man-made greenhouse effect, but simply that our effect on climate events is not as great as we have believed. The other possibility is that, in our simulations, we have underestimated how much the climate fluctuates owing to natural causes.

SPIEGEL: That sounds quite embarrassing for your profession, if you have to go back and adjust your models to fit with realityÂ…

Storch: Why? That's how the process of scientific discovery works. There is no last word in research, and that includes climate research. It's never the truth that we offer, but only our best possible approximation of reality. But that often gets forgotten in the way the public perceives and describes our work.

SPIEGEL: But it has been climate researchers themselves who have feigned a degree of certainty even though it doesn't actually exist. For example, the IPCC announced with 95 percent certainty that humans contribute to climate change.

Storch: And there are good reasons for that statement. We could no longer explain the considerable rise in global temperatures observed between the early 1970s and the late 1990s with natural causes.... Now that we have a new development, we may need to make adjustments.

SPIEGEL: In which areas do you need to improve the models?

Storch: Among other things, there is evidence that the oceans have absorbed more heat than we initially calculated. Temperatures at depths greater than 700 meters (2,300 feet) appear to have increased more than ever before. The only unfortunate thing is that our simulations failed to predict this effect.

SPIEGEL: That doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Storch: Certainly the greatest mistake of climate researchers has been giving the impression that they are declaring the definitive truth. The end result is foolishness along the lines of the climate protection brochures recently published by Germany's Federal Environmental Agency under the title "Sie erwärmt sich doch" ("The Earth is getting warmer"). Pamphlets like that aren't going to convince any skeptics. It's not a bad thing to make mistakes and have to correct them. The only thing that was bad was acting beforehand as if we were infallible. By doing so, we have gambled away the most important asset we have as scientists: the public's trust.

Emphasis added.

He doesn't come across as a zealot-- far from it, compared to the rest of the Green Machine. In fact, he tosses criticisms at them left and right.

And yet...

The only unfortunate thing is that our simulations failed to predict this effect.

Well, as you can see, there is still so much ego in play one doubts one could get a truly objective assessment from these guys.

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