Links For Sunday

Germany goes solar coal for cheap energy.

U.S. exports coal to China for their cheap energy - while at the same time Obama and the EPA conduct their own war on coal and our energy infrastructure. We do not have an energy policy in this country, and it is very shortly going to bite us in the ass - hard. As usual, those who suffer most will be those on the low end of the economic scale, the people the left supposedly represent.

At Nature, they are discussing what to expect in 2011. Among the hot topics:

. . . The North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project reached bedrock in July 2010, at a depth of more than 2,500 metres. The fruits of that effort should soon be seen, now that researchers are analysing gas and particles trapped inside the ice core to reveal details of the climate of the Eemian interglacial period (130,000–115,000 years ago), when the average global temperature was about 5°C warmer than today.

That is a whopping 9 deg. Far. hotter then today. Nine degrees when there was no appreciable human contribution to carbon dioxide. And NASA's resident nut, Jim Hansen, is trying to convince us that 2010 is the "hottest year on record." Talk about requiring a willful suspension of disbelief.

Sage advice to the new Congress from Prof. Glen Reynolds:

. . . [R]emember that fortune favors the bold. It's true that ordinarily in politics, most progress occurs at the margins. But it's also true that these are not ordinary times. Big money-saving and government-shrinking proposals in the House, even if they're shot down by the Democrat-controlled Senate, will nonetheless establish a tone.

They're trying to hide it, but the Inside-the-Beltway permanent-government political class is currently scared. Keep them that way, while showing the public at large that you're serious. . . .

The NYT notes that the public is waking up to the toxic scam of public sector unions. Let us hope that the debacle in NYC, where lives were lost while the public union slow rolled clearing snow, becomes the icon for ending the pox of public sector unions on America. It is a fifty year old exercise in corrupt Dem. politics that needs to end before it buries us. As John at Powerline notes:

Enough is enough. Legalization of public employee unions has been a disaster. It is time to end the experiment and make them illegal once again, at both the federal and state levels. I expect that this will become one of the great political issues of the next decade.

And while we are waiting for that sea change, the next big step is to pass the legislation proposed by California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes (he's a lonely guy) that will require states to account for the degree to which their public sector pension funds are undercapitalized while also establishing a ban on federal bailouts of public pension programs.

The AP finally comes around to the position that the entitlement state is a disaster.

At the American, a fascinating article on how the government caused the Great Recession. In particular, they point to "a potent mix of six major government policies that together rewarded short-sighted collective risk-taking and penalized long-term business leadership." As an aside, it is worth noting that Obama's "bipartisan" Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is finally set to release its fictional report in January, 2011. The Commission refused to consider the role of Fannie and Freddie in the crisis. Indeed, so useless is the report that Obama felt no need to wait on it before passing new financial regulations ostensibly intended to fix the causes of or financial meltdown.

Commenting on the MSNBC interview with GOPROUD chairman, Chris Barron, shown below, John at Powerline remarks: "[L]iberalism is all about screwing certain people so that others can enjoy a windfall, and trying to cobble together an electoral majority out of that corruption. Conservatism, on the other hand, is all about building a better society for everyone." Amen. And that indeed is a point that needs to be hammered home to each of the victim constituencies that the far left relies on for their power base. We want them to emerge from victimhood, the left, to survive, needs to keep them there.



And on this day in history, in 1492, the Reconquista of Spain was complete when the last Muslim ruler of Granada, Muhammad XII, surrendered his kingdom to Isabella I of Castile.