If your humble correspondent were among the opinion writers in modern media who style themselves as “fact checkers,” perhaps this column would have no choice but to label a Tuesday presidential statement as “mostly false.”
In the State Dining Room of the White House, President Joe Biden said:
And I’m about to sign the Inflation Reduction Act into law, one of the most significant laws in our history. Let me say from the start: With this law, the American people won and the special interests lost. The American people won and the special interests lost.
Shortly afterward, Akshat Rathi and Jennifer Dlouhy of Bloomberg reported:
It was the middle of July — with temperatures surging through one of the hottest summers in US history, half of the country in drought — and the Senate’s all-important member, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, had slammed the brakes on legislation to combat global warming. Again.
That’s when billionaire philanthropist and clean-energy investor Bill Gates got on the phone with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose job it was to hold together the Democrats’ no-vote-to-spare majority.
One of the world’s richest men felt he had to give one of the nation’s most powerful lawmakers a little pep talk. “[Schumer] said to me on one call that he’d shown infinite patience,” Gates recounted in an interview last week, describing for the first time his personal effort to keep climate legislation alive.
“You’re right,” Gates told Schumer. “And all you need to do is show infinite plus one patience.”
Gates was banking on more than just his trademark optimism about addressing climate change and other seemingly intractable problems that have been his focus since stepping down as Microsoft’s chief executive two decades ago. As he revealed to Bloomberg Green, he has quietly lobbied Manchin and other senators, starting before President Joe Biden had won the White House, in anticipation of a rare moment in which heavy federal spending might be secured for the clean-energy transition.
Mr. Gates, who is worth about $115 billion according to Forbes, is not the only one cheering the new Biden spending plan. Other billionaires or even mere millionaires who bet big on solar and wind energy and battery technology should enjoy a nice Biden bump. The Bloomberg account continues:
Gates started wooing Manchin and other senators who might prove pivotal for clean-energy policy in 2019 over a meal in Washington DC. “My dialogue with Joe has been going on for quite a while,” Gates said. “Almost everyone on the energy committee” — of which Manchin was then the senior-most Democrat — “came over and spent a few hours with me over dinner.”
It sure is nice to be able to summon almost an entire congressional committee to one’s table. While this might prove challenging for the average American, there are few interests in Washington more special than someone who sits atop a pile valued at north of $100 billion. But given all his wealth, why does Bill Gates need to go to Washington? Mr. Rathi and Ms. Dlouhy report:
…innovations that start in university labs often need even more government support to reach mass adoption, according to the way Gates sees things. Take a startup making carbon-free cement — success means bringing to market a product that’s as much as three times as expensive as normal cement.
This is no hypothetical for Gates. His investments through Breakthrough Energy, the Gates organization that does climate work, has sunk at least tens of millions into green cement startups such as Ecocem, Chement and Brimstone. None have yet reached commercial scale. He saw the bankruptcy filing of a battery startup he backed, Aquion, that might have had a fighting chance if energy-storage tax credits were available.
Is there a more worthy cause for taxpayers than trying to turn such losing investments into winners? To be fair, Mr. Gates was hardly the only person advocating for the enactment of the giant subsidy bonanza. Alternative-energy companies, union bosses and executives at numerous nonprofit organizations also helped campaign for a big tax-and-spending hike. Mr. Rathi and Ms. Dlouhy note:
Two weeks of throw-everything-at-the-wall lobbying paid off. On July 27, Schumer and Manchin unveiled more than $37 billion in annual spending over the next decade on climate and energy.
Perhaps Mr. Biden had trouble with the teleprompter on Tuesday and intended to say that the special interests won and the American people lost.
As for Mr. Gates, sensible friends or family members could have tried to warn him not to associate with the unsavory characters who populate the D.C. swamp. But maybe he knew all along that the climate bill was not going to kill itself.
As regards the real winners and losers, here’s the juice: As Tucker records…
…John Q. Taxpayer is the decided loser, and Progressive special interests the unquestioned winner. With the Big Guy getting his usual cut.
As for Joe Manchin, who dined with Bill Gates before suddenly reversing course on funding green energy special interests to combat climate change, a solution in search of an actual problem, the question isn’t whether Manchin has been bought off, only how much it took, when the payoff will be made and in what form it will come.
Meanwhile…
NEW: For the first time, we witnessed the TX National Guard close & lock a gate on private property at a major crossing area in Eagle Pass, denying entry to migrants who just crossed illegally & expected to be let in. Border Patrol then came w/ a key & let them in for processing. pic.twitter.com/S1fZaTJnEi
Hey, gotta have plenty of cheap labor to cut Bill’s and Joe’s lawns. By the way, we were struck by the parallel between federal agents opening a gate near the border to admit those illegally trespassing in the United States and this scene from the January 6 “insurrection”:
It’s almost as if someone wanted them to enter.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, NRO‘s Dan McLaughlin makes the case for and against Liz Cheney as he relates…
“…That leads us to the third and fundamental problem: monomania. Cheney allowed her public profile to become one in which she was seen and heard doing nothing else besides attacking Donald Trump…
…Worse, it became a self-defeating cycle. As it became clearer that Cheney could not win her primary with the support of the same Republican voters who put her in office, she worked harder to court the state’s Democrats, increasingly signaling her distance from Republican voters on the social-issue concerns that animate much of the party these days, leading people to forget her voting record and doubt whether she would remain as solidly conservative in the future…
…Cheney’s poor political judgment was emblematized by a recent interview in which she expressed unwillingness to support Ron DeSantis if he ran for president in 2024. A DeSantis 2024 campaign is, as even David Frum has acknowledged, something of an acid test of the sincerity of people who argue that Trump is a figure of uniquely bad character, uniquely bad for our democratic system. Even acknowledging the legitimate reasons why DeSantis may not be the first choice of a lot of Republicans and conservatives, there is no reason why someone with a 90-plus percent pro-Trump voting record in the House should be ruling out supporting him, unless they are either checked out of the Republican Party or decided on a presidential run of their own that demands an unrealistic level of anti-Trump purity. In more practical terms, if Trump is to be defeated in a primary in 2024, it will require those who wish his defeat to unite behind the most plausible alternative, rather than splinter into a constellation of vanity campaigns that, in Edmund Burke’s phrase, “fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
…Cheney last night compared herself to Abraham Lincoln, noting that Lincoln lost races for the House and Senate before becoming president. She might have considered Lincoln’s example more thoroughly…
…Lincoln never lost sight of the fact that political parties exist to advance causes, and that politics must be played as a team sport in order to accomplish those causes. That means meeting your voters and the members of your coalition where they are. If he were alive today, he would surely admire Liz Cheney’s courage, integrity, and sacrifice in telling the truth about Donald Trump, just as Lincoln himself told unpopular truths about the origins of the Mexican War during his single term in the House. But he would probably also question the wisdom of cutting herself off so far from a political team that she will no longer be in a position to advance any cause she believes in.“
Sorry, but from where we sit, like The Donald, Liz Cheney believes in only one thing: Herself.
Next, regarding the purported release of the Mar-a-Lago raid affidavit, Townhall.com‘s Matt Vespa reports…
In other words, in the opinion of Mark Davis, an opinion we incidentally share, this “release” is a smokescreen, a nothing-burger, a meaningless gesture to placate the ignorant and misinformed and buy the DOJ time. The only question is for what?
And in the EnvironMental Moment, NRO informs us against all odds, or at least against every EnviroNazi pronouncement, the…
Great Barrier Reef Defies Doomsday Predictions
“The headlines were dire: “Half of the Great Barrier Reef’s corals have been killed by climate change,” CBS News reported in October 2020.
Bleaching of the reef’s corals is “getting more widespread,” the New York Times reported earlier that year.A Vice headline in 2017 promoting David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II documentary said, “the Great Barrier Reef will die this century,” while National Geographic predicted an earlier demise for reefs around the globe: “Coral reefs could begone in 30 years.”
It became almost common knowledge that the Great Barrier Reef was assuredly doomed, the victim of a warming climate, rising ocean temperatures, and increasingly acidic water.
Then, in early August, the authoritative Australian Institute of Marine Science released a new report on the 1,400-mile natural wonder. Two-thirds of the reef — its northern and central regions — are showing record levels of coral cover. The southern region is also showing high levels of coral cover. The AIMS report was hardly a portrait of a dying ecosystem.
While the news may have been shocking to those who have been relying on the mainstream media for their information, it was no surprise to Peter Ridd, a marine geophysicist in Australia who has been studying the Great Barrier Reef since the mid 1980s. Ridd, 62, has long been a prominent voice dissenting from the chorus of reef doomsayers and what he describes as “the usual scaremongers” predicting the reef’s impending death.
“It’s just been half a century of doom, doom, doom, doom, doom. And now we’ve got records amount of coral,” Ridd told National Review in a telephone interview from Australia…”
Not that the EnviroNazi doomsayers would lie to you; And if they did it was with the best of intentions: Destroying Capitalism by saving the planet from a non-existent problem.
Moving on, here’s an octet of items specially selected for inquiring Conservative minds:
(1). The repugnant, prevaricating host of CNN’s manifestly misnomered Reliable Sourcesis leaving the network, his show having been cancelled. We’d wish George Costanza’s dumber stunt double good luck and godspeed, but we don’t indulge in counterfeit cordiality. Yeah, he’ll be missed…
Thus, just as with obesity, which is closely associated with five of the top ten causes of death worldwide, Progressives demand affirmation rather than treatment for an incredibly damaging form of mental illness.
Consider also at the same time transgender advocates urge doctors to ask toddlers their gender, champions of the obese suggest physicians have no reason to inquire as to their patients’ weight. These people truly are…
The amount of American prestige he left behind in Kabul is incalculable. Way to go, Brandon!!!
(5). This ad tells New Jersey parents interested in their children being educated, NOT indoctrinated, just what Garden State teachers think of them:
(6). In a display of deliberate disinformation and amazing chutzpah we thought only official government mouthpieces in third world/Communist dictatorships capable of peddling, The Washington Free Beacon informs us Joe Scarborough brought on…open your mouth so your head doesn’t explode…the completely disgraced, proven prevaricator Peter Strzok to assure us, “Absolutely the American public should trust what the FBI is doing“. As The Beacon editors noted, “Asking this man to vouch for the integrity of the FBI is like putting Bernie Madoff in charge of the Securities and Exchange Commission.”
(7). Since we’re on the subject of those utterly undeserving of trust, Rochelle Walensky’s plaintive pleas notwithstanding…
(8). In a related item, D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser is hellbent on ignoring not only the CDC’s guidelines but undeniable science as she continues to demand, as a requirement to attend her city’s underperforming schools, students who don’t need it be inoculated with a vaccine which doesn’t work. As one enterprising journalist tweeted:
I asked D.C. @MayorBowser how she could justify forcing 40% of unvaccinated black students to stay home from school. She said my numbers were wrong. They’re her numbers. pic.twitter.com/Gmoidu1YuU
Only a dissembling Dimocrat would find fault with their own figures.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Balls Cotton…
…along with this instant classic from Speed:
Finally, we’ll call it a week with yet another titillating tale torn from the pages of The Crime Blotter, as we learn a…
Florida teacher charged after missing teen found at her home
“…The boy was reported missing by his parents on Aug. 12, the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office said in a press release. Information investigators received led them to the home of 31-year-old teacher Kelly Simpson. Simpson was placed under arrest for interfering with the custody of a minor. She allegedly picked up the teen boy from an unknown location and concealed him inside her home while knowing he was reported missing.
Simpson is currently employed by Charlotte County Public Schools…”
Not for long.
Magoo
Video of the Day
Tucker exposes how the DOJ/FBI created the Wretched Gretchen kidnap plot. And you REALLY think they WOULDN’T try a similar scam on January 6 to take Trump down?!? A little long but WELL worth the time.
Tales of The Darkside
Matt Walsh highlights yet another reason to dismiss Serena Williams.
On the Lighter Side
Can anyone compile a similar montage showing Conservatives so frequently calling for violence?
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