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SCOTUS Sales-Tax Ruling Negatively
Impacting Small Biz
Political Editors
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22 states sue Trump over repeal of scumbag/
liar-nObama-era power plant rules
By REBECCA BEITSCH
{ thehill.com } ~ A coalition of mostly Democratic-led states has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, arguing its rules for addressing power plant pollution are so weak they violate federal law... Attorneys general from 22 states and several major cities including New York City and Los Angeles argue that the Trump administration's rule violates the Clean Air Act by having virtually no impact on carbon emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had finalized the rule in June to repeal and replace a capstone scumbag/liar-nObama-era carbon pollution regulation they say exceeded agency authority. The new replacement rule to the Clean Power Plan (CPP), deemed the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, aims to give states more time and authority to decide how to implement the best new technology to ease net emissions from coal-fired plants. “Besides ignoring the science of climate change – the text of the ACE rule barely mentions climate change, much less recognizes the dire threat it poses to people’s health, the economy, and the environment – the rule disregards requirements of the federal Clean Air Act,” which requires regulators to use the “best system of emission reduction,” New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) said in a press release. The suit is the second against the rule, following one filed in July from the American Lung Association. "The ACE plan is trying to reduce the progress California and other states are making and keep failing coal pants on life support," California Air Resources Board Chair Mary Nichols said while standing alongside California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who is also joining the suit... https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/457252-22-states-sue-trump-over-repeal-of-obama-era-power-plant-rules .
Renewable Energy Hits the Wall
By Norman Rogers
{ americanthinker.com } ~ If the official definitions of renewable energy were logical, renewable energy would be defined as energy that does not emit CO2 and that is not using a resource in danger of running out anytime soon... But the definitions written into the laws of many states are not logical. Hydroelectric energy is mostly banned because the environmental movement hates dams. Nuclear is banned because a hysterical fear of nuclear energy was created by environmental groups. Both nuclear and hydro don't emit CO2. Hydro doesn't need fuel. Nuclear fuel is cheap and plentiful. A large number of prominent global warming activists, such as James Hansen, Michael Shellenberger, and Stewart Brand have declared that nuclear is the only solution for the crisis that they imagine is approaching. For those of us who don't take global warming seriously, there is nothing wrong with using coal and natural gas to generate electricity. The CO2 emitted helps plants to grow better with less water, a great help to agriculture. In approximately thirty states that mandate renewable energy, the only scalable forms of renewable energy allowed are wind and solar. California mandates that 60% of its electricity come from renewable energy by 2030. Nevada mandates 50% by 2030. There are other types of official renewable energy, but they can't be easily scaled up. Examples are geothermal energy, wave energy, and garbage dump methane. Wind and solar are erratic sources of energy. The output depends on the weather. Solar doesn't work at night. Because they are erratic, there have to be backup plants, generally natural gas plants, that balance the erratic flow of electricity from wind or solar. The backup plants increase output when renewable energy output declines and vice versa. Because both wind and solar are subjected to periods of near zero output, the backup system has to be able to carry the entire load of the electric grid without the wind or solar. Neither wind nor solar can replace conventional plants. If you hear that a utility is replacing fossil fuel plants with wind or solar, that can't happen. The most that can happen is that the fossil fuel plants will use less fuel when the wind or solar is generating electricity. For a natural gas plant, the gas to generate a megawatt-hour of electricity costs about $20. That $20 is the economic value of each megawatt-hour generated by wind or solar. Unsubsidized, wind or solar electricity, either one, costs about $80 a megawatt-hour to generate. The difference between $80 and $20 is the subsidy that has to be paid in order to use wind or solar. As long as the percentage of electricity that comes from wind or solar is small, the grid can handle the erratic nature of that electricity. But if the penetration becomes large, severe problems start to emerge. Solar power is strongest in the middle of the day and weakens toward the end of the day. But the late afternoon and early evening, when solar is dying, are when power usage peaks in many locations. The graph below shows how the sun's strength varied in Las Vegas for July 2018....
Europe faces security threat from the
rise in Chinese military power
By GARY SCHMITT
{ thehill.com } ~ During the Cold War, the European allies of the United States were overwhelmingly focused on the strategic threat posed by the Soviet Union... When it came to the Middle East, the European powers had ceded responsibility for maintaining stability there to the United States following the 1956 Suez Crisis. Similarly, when it came to East Asia, China could be an irritant, but Beijing breaking with Moscow and the American web of security ties in the region meant Europe had little to be concerned about as a security matter when it came to the Asia Pacific arena. Today, that has all changed. Although Russia remains a strategic problem, the European powers are now deeply enmeshed in the power plays of the Middle East. China, once thought of as mostly an untapped market into which Europe could invest and to which it could export, has also become a matter of strategic concern. Last week, on a visit to Australia, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview that, while there were many reasons for the alliance to be in conversation with its Asian partners, there was a specific “need to assess the security consequences for all of us of the rising military power of China.” He added that this was not about NATO expanding its military presence in Asia, but rather about dealing with the fact that China was “coming closer” to Europe. Stoltenberg is right that the rapid growth in Chinese military power has consequences for NATO and Europe more generally. At a fundamental level, a rising and ambitious China must be deterred from undermining the security and stability of the Asian Pacific region. With security pledges and ties throughout the region, doing so falls mainly on the United States. The reality is, with Chinese military advancements, the ability to carry out that deterrent task is no longer a sure thing. For the Trump administration to successfully carry out its national security strategy, the United States will need to beef up its military presence in Asia and to modernize its forces to deal with the complicated array of defensive and offensive weapons that China has been putting in place since the late 1990s. The problem is that the United States military is only scaled in size and capabilities to handle a single major contingency, with little left over if that crisis becomes a conflict. For NATO, this means a fight in the East leaves the United States with no surge capacity to handle at the same time a Russian threat. Given the improving but still underperforming conventional capabilities of most of the major European NATO allies, this has created a strategic “black hole” that should worry military planners both in the Pentagon and at NATO headquarters in Brussels....
How scumbag-Al Sharpton
Abandoned Africa’s Slaves
By Charles Jacobs
{ americanthinker.com } ~ The eminent African-American economist Glenn Loury recently wondered in the New York Times why leading Democrats would defend scumbag-Al Sharpton, a man who is a blatant anti-Semite, an anti-white racist, and to many, a simple con man... loose lips liar-Joe Biden calls him “a champion in the fight for civil rights.” Elizabeth dinky-Warren says “he has dedicated his life to the fight for justice for all,” and lowlife-Kamala Harris lauds him as a man who “has spent his life fighting for what’s right.” Records show that President scumbag/liar-nObama had scumbag-Sharpton visit his White House 118 times. This, after scumbag-Sharpton’s many outrages: the Tawana Brawley rape hoax of 1987, the anti-Jewish Crown Heights riots of 1991, and the firebombing of a Jewish-owned Harlem fashion boutique in 1995. Loury suggests that any one of these things should have disqualified scumbag-Sharpton from national platforms, along with any praise by Democratic Party leaders. But there’s something else, something no less repugnant, and perhaps even more shocking, that should obliterate once and for all the perception of scumbag-Al Sharpton as a tough guy who never buckles when it comes to defending his race. scumbag-Al Sharpton is betraying black people currently enslaved in Africa. He went there. He spoke to them. He promised the slaves he met that he would awaken American blacks to their plight, but then he abandoned them. He abandoned them, I believe, because they are enslaved by Arab Muslims. A review of just how this came about should be instructive. In 2001, as scumbag-Sharpton contemplated a run for president in the 2004 election, he made a trip to Sudan to verify reports of the ongoing enslavement of Christian blacks there by Arab Muslims. Reports were emerging of Arabs from northern Sudan raiding black Christian villages in the south of Africa’s then-largest country, killing the men and enslaving the women and children. Full disclosure: At the time, I headed a movement to educate the public about modern-day slavery. We worked with the human rights organization Christian Solidarity International, which over the years redeemed tens of thousands of slaves in Sudan who were returned to their villages. To be fair, scumbag-Sharpton’s 2001 trip to Sudan required courage. He flew with CSI leaders into a war zone on one of CSI’s regular slave redemption missions to see and talk to the slaves. The mission was protected by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), a black militia defending southern villages against an onslaught that had over the years killed millions and enslaved tens of thousands, an onslaught that the Islamist rulers in Khartoum designated a jihad. scumbag-Sharpton was appalled. He said it was “outrageous that no nationally known civil rights group has gone over to Africa to criticize what is happening there.” He met with slave women, who showed him their scars from being beaten and raped. One asked him if the world knew of her people’s suffering; scumbag-Sharpton replied, “They don’t know now, but they will soon.”....
Do the Democrats Have an Issue?
By Steve Feinstein
{ americanthinker.com } ~ The poor Democrats: As the Russia collusion/Mueller investigation issue disappeared into nothingness like so much skywriting wisping away into the winds, so too did the surefire issue with which the Dems thought the White House would automatically be theirs in 2020... The candidate himself was irrelevant, an afterthought. We have it in the bag, the Dems thought. It's just a matter of to which person we bestow the privilege of the presidency this time around. Let's pick a good one: a woman. No, a woman of color. No, a gay. No, a Hispanic. Perhaps an American Indian. But that slam-dunk Russia issue is gone. scumbag liar-Jerry Nadler and scumbag-Adam Schiff are still flailing about, trying to collect their "undeniable" Russian collusion evidence and convince the rest of the Democratic caucus to initiate impeachment proceedings. It looks doubtful that that's going to come to pass. So the "president's a crook" angle apparently is not going to deliver a greased downhill slide into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the Democrats. It appears — at this juncture, at least — that the Democrats will actually have to come up with a convincing policy platform in order to win the White House. They'll have to identify substantive issues of actual importance and persuade enough undecideds that the Democratic Party will improve their lives and make the country safer and more prosperous. What are their issues? What are the candidates putting forth thus far? Does any of them seem like a game-changer, the lynchpin to electoral victory? One policy they've all put forth, in one form or another, is a single-payer government-run health care system, sometimes referred to as Medicare for All. Almost all the Dems propose the elimination of the private insurance industry in favor of a European-style system. After all, health care is a "right," not a "privilege." Ah, but the devil is in the details. How, in actuality, do we get rid of the insurance industry? What happens to those millions of workers? How do we set up the federal health care bureaucracy? How long will that take? Medicare currently covers 80% of the Part B expenses — where will other the 20% come from that is currently funded by private insurance programs? Or will this new Medicare for All now cover all 100%? Has that been figured into the cost estimates? No Democratic candidate ever says. They probably haven't thought it through that far; they probably don't even know. Getting rid of the private insurance industry is a pipe dream, a hollow talking point. It will simply never happen. Never, and the Dems know it....
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SCOTUS Sales-Tax Ruling Negatively Impacting Small Biz
Political Editors: Last year in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in South Dakota v. Wayfair that states could collect sales taxes on purchases made online from a vendor whose “physical presence” was not within the state of purchase. One of the prevailing arguments made in favor of states to tax online out-of-state purchases was that it would serve to protect small mom-and-pop businesses that were subjected to in-state sales taxes. That rational was dubious at the time, and the Court’s ruling has proven to most negatively impact these small businesses.
The Wall Street Journal reports that “states have since enacted disparate rules, which as we warned are straining small business. As a case in point, the Kansas Department of Revenue will now require all out-of-state retailers to collect sales tax no matter how much business they do in the state. This includes college students selling used textbooks on eBay and retirees hawking a few hand-made greeting cards on Etsy .”
Following the Court’s ruling, Investor’s Business Daily predicted that online retailers “will soon have to comply with nearly 10,000 different tax jurisdictions across the country in the 45 states that impose taxes. That means different rates, varying definitions of products, and a variety of exemptions. The resulting complexity is mind-boggling.” Well, prediction is now reality.
Evidence is now revealing that the real losers from this ruling are those same small businesses the online-interstate tax advocates claimed they were seeking to protect. While Justice Anthony Kennedy, who voted with the majority, asserted that “the physical presence rule … has limited States’ ability to seek long-term prosperity,” he seems to have ignored the fact that this prosperity comes at the expense of small business. Now, these businesses are accountable for paying taxes not only within the state of their physical presence but in all the states. So much for federalism. ~The Patriot Post
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