This is ludicrous:

Some of you will see an extra charge in your next electric bill because Pepco and BGE lost money when they couldn’t charge customers to deliver power during the storm outage.

…

Only regulators in Maryland allow utilities to recoup lost billings by invoicing customers directly.

“It’s the law,” said Pepco spokesman Bob Hainey. “It’s called bill stabilization.”

…

Officials in the District and Virginia say the utilities can not charge customers for lost billings there – so this is unique to Maryland customers.

It’s called highway robbery. It may be the law, but the fact is there was no power being consumed by millions of people for days and yet, MD allows for them to be charged for no service!  Power losses led to water shortages, food losses in refrigerators and freezers, which then led to expensive alternatives like eating out.  Thousands were at risk health wise, sanitation issues ‘blossomed’ – and for all this suffering MD consumers are handed the bill?
Can everyone see shades of Obamacare in this life lesson? When the government runs the monopoly, they are free to take from you as they see fit.

In VA there is no such need or requirement. We also have balanced budget, better economic growth and lower unemployment than MD.  Wonder why that is?…..

When someone seeks a second term in office, the basic question for the voters is whether they support where the incumbent has been leading, and do they want more of the same. Today team Obama got some really, really, really bad news. Apparently, the number of voters who think Obama has made things worse with his policies, who think there are numerous better options out there, who clearly DON’T want more of the same, is at a landslide producing number:

A new poll for The Hill found 56 percent of likely voters believe Obama’s first term has transformed the nation in a negative way, compared to 35 percent who believe the country has changed for the better under his leadership.

That 20% difference is very similar to Rasmussen’s “strongly support/oppose” numbers. It also means the “not sure” number, while is at the typical 5-9% or so of the electorate level, is sitting way to the right of an Obama reelection scenario. These numbers reflect a blow out of Reaganesque proportions.

Team Obama is in deep, deep trouble.  Because there is  no way to change this dynamic in the time left before November, and the economic mess we are currently stuck in will not be abating. I have always been confident Obama would not survive is naive policies. Now I am almost certain he will be the one term disaster he said he was willing to be when challenged on all those bad policy decisions years ago.

America is in bad shape, thanks to the irresponsible and naive leftist policies that were rushed into place under Obama, Reid and Pelosi starting in 2009.  Sadly, one of the three is still in control of a major portion of the  legislative process, so while 2010 brought us one of the most historic political drubbings of all time, and the most historic in living memory, the fact is there will be no change in America’s direction until January of 2013. So here we simmer and wait, until that time democracy speaks clearly and loudly.

The June jobs report was no surprise. Once again the work force size is historically small (should be about 65.5% of the population). So the classic unemployment number is a fiction hiding a sea of economic pain out there in the country.  While the U3 index says we have  8.2% unemployment, if we had a normal workforce size the real unemployment number is almost 11%. Millions who want to work and can work, are not even being counted as unemployed. They go unnoticed by the bureaucrats in DC.

The only economic recovery is occurring in states with GOP governors:

Voters in 17 states elected new Republican governors in November 2010. This new breed of fiscally-conservative, tea party-supported Republican governors took office in January 2011. Here is how those states have fared since then, in terms of their unemployment rates:

…

Every single one of these 17 states has seen its unemployment rate decline since January 2011.

Every single state with a newly minted, Tea Party (aka SMALL government) backed, governor has shown positive results in only 1.5 years.  Obama?  3 years in and he is still sucking wind. Ignorance can do that to a ‘leader’.

The Democrat led states seem to be accelerating their doom. Look at what California just did:

The Democratic governor, whose party controls both the Senate and Assembly, received authorization to spend $4.75 billion from bonds to begin construction of a bullet train in the most indebted U.S. state.

The vote follows adoption of a budget that will chop three weeks off the school year for 6 million public-school students if voters reject Brown’s tax initiative. At the same time, the 74-year-old governor and fellow Democrats are at an impasse on lowering public-employee pension costs, while polls show waning support for the rail project.

“It’s incredibly tone-deaf to reject something voters want, like pension reform, while approving something they don’t want, like high-speed rail,” said Aaron McLear, a spokesman for the anti-tax campaign. “Enacting billions of dollars in unpopular spending while dismissing popular reform is not the way to sell” a tax increase.

Those state funds will be augmented with over $3 billion of federal money – all of to be pissed down the drain to lay track in the middle of nowhere.  A high speed air mover.  Note to California – you are hereby on your own. When your economic idiocy finally falls down around your shoulders, the rest of the country will point to this waste of money to make sure those of us being frugal (and sane) are not stuck with your bad checks. You are not going to get any bailout money from us. Not after this insanity.

To set the context of the election, here is how the left creates jobs:

A tiny amendment buried in the federal transportation bill to be signed today by President Barack Obama will put operators of roll-your-own cigarette operations in Las Vegas and nationwide out of business at midnight.

Where does the federal government get to restrict legal businesses like this (and yes, smoking is bad for you but still legal)? In a transportation bill no less?

This is why we have to dismantle government. This is why the libertarian grass roots movement (sometimes labeled the Tea Party, though there is no party) is still alive and preparing to kick.

Romney and the GOP will NEVER see broad energetic support from the voters until they start cutting back the government and neutering its ability to control Main Street. Promises mean nothing. If they are seen as another flavor of DC arrogance, they will only be given enough power to neuter the opposition. But if they are ready to take back America from DC, they will win landslide after landslide.

Finally, for all those HS Science Class rejects (yes, I am talking about you journalism majors), while we have been quite warm the last few weeks, overall the GLOBAL climate has been decidedly cool, with no end in sight:

BRITAIN is facing its “worst ever” summer with cold wet weather ruining family holidays and blighting the Olympics, forecasters warned last night.

August is set to be a washout following a miserable July and the wettest June since records began – meaning summer is effectively over.

We happened to have experienced the rare pocket of warmth, that intensified as it was blocked by cooler air masses west, east and north. It is not uncommon to find hotspots in any gas or liquid, and we just experienced one. Just like last week was not GLOBAL WARMING, this week will not be GLOBAL COOLING, but the departure of a well formed, stable hot spot. Click the image to see how much of the “globe” is unseasonably warm versus unseasonably cool.

See here and here for more on this ISOLATED atmospheric event.  Clearly, the Green Leftists are out crying “WOLF!” again.

I tend to be with those who note the Roberts’ Court decision on Obamacare is a clarion signal that American Independence is once again threatened. But this time the threat comes from our own bloated, out of control and inept federal government. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air discovered this excellent synopsis of where we stand as a nation. And I agree, we should never rely on 9 justices to enforce the will of the people.  We can fix this.

As the clip says in the intro, this is for all you knuckle-draggers Neanderthals in flyover country (BTW, I are one too):

Just want to thank all those who work so hard to make this country great, and our lives productive, fruitful and safe. This year, I want to especially recognize those here at home, who are working at this very moment to return power to those hit by the storm last Friday night. This includes elderly folks like my parents who are still camped out in a hotel, hoping to move back home.

As usual, our thoughts and prayers go out to those serving overseas to keep this nation safe – and that includes our own US Marine.

We are blessed with this great country. It needs to be protected and cherished and kept safe for future generations of Americans.

Happy Birthday America!

[Click to enlarge image] That was an incredible natural event that blew through the DC area Friday night. The Washington Post ran an excellent article on it Saturday describing the event (which means half the region could not read it – doh!):

Between 9:30 and 11 p.m. Friday night, one of the most destructive complexes of thunderstorms in memory swept through the entire D.C. area. Packing wind gusts of 60-80 mph, the storm produced extensive damage, downing hundreds of trees, and leaving more than 1 million area-residents without power.

Racing along at speeds over 60 mph, the bowing line of thunderstorms formed west of Chicago around 11 a.m. and by midnight approached the Atlantic ocean.

Emphasis mine. It is amazing a storm that formed outside Chicago could hold itself together and grow, let alone move at that speed. The wonders of nature.

I woke up (outside DC in Northern VA) around 10:15 to an amazing light show and really phenomenal winds. We rarely see hurricane force winds here (usually the ‘canes that reach us have depleted back down to Tropical Storm force). It was something else. One of the few times we have woken the kids and rushed to the basement.

Saturday was a real experience as well. Very spotty cell service because the damage was so deep and wide.  We had to drive to get the phones to work (and charge), but there was nobody to call!  Even 9-11 service was down in many areas of the region. I went to check on my parents (both around 90 years old) and brought them to one of a handful of homes in our neighborhood to have power (and TV – really bizarre!). LJStrata tore off in search of a hotel room. She had to drive to discover if there were any available rooms. Around the 6th stop she succeeded, snagging the second to last room.  By the time we had my parents checked in early Saturday afternoon, apparently all the hotel rooms were booked as far south as Richmond.

Many of us just roughed it the coolness of our basements as the outside temps hit 103° F.

The run on stores for ice and water was intense. We had water, just not hot water. A downside to those new energy efficient tankless water heater systems. We had the gas, but not the electricity to spark it!

The rule of the day on the roads was: “no left turns”. So many lights were out they decided to stop left hand turns and crossings at lights. Made for some adventurous trips. Thankfully I am a home grown local and know how to go everywhere on right hand turns only.

It was amazing to see how fragile our existence is without technology and power. Gas stations closed, refrigerators inaccessible (unless you wanted to lose a lot of food), limited water, etc. A good reminder of how much we have and why it would be much worse to be without cheap and available energy. We got a snapshot of Al Gore’s perfect world, and he can keep it.

Funniest moment was Sunday morning when I was checking on my parent’s house and then scouting a place for breakfast (decided to stick with McDonalds since it was fast and cheap).  At 0800 the local Starbucks had lines out the doors as the caffeine addicts gathered to get their morning jolt (I drink a lot of coffee, but was OK with a few hour delay).

We were lucky. We were only out of power less than 48 hours, and our food kept. Too many will be out until mid to late week. One  story we heard from Reston Town Center was horrible. The place was closed off early and was without power last we heard Sunday evening. We were told of elderly people taking their walkers to the swimming pools to scoop up water to flush toilets. My hat off to their ingenuity and perseverance, but there really needs to be a plan in place for these long duration outages that ensure the elderly and infirm are taken care of. It is why we did not waste a hotel room on ourselves, but tried to leave it for those in need. Too many people who could rough it out were in air conditioned hotels, while those in true need roughed it out.

Not sure how to address this. I don’t want a nanny-state solution. But in high rises, it might be a good idea to know who may be in need during extended power outages, and work with local hotel and restaurant owners to set up a plan to help deal with them. For example, my parent’s house was cooler than hours, but they have a well and needed power for water. So we could rough it out, they could not due to lack of water.

Anyway, nature put on one helluva show. And reminded humanity how puny it is in the grand scheme of things. We are adaptive and bright, but not All Powerful.

Update: As I said, for those still without power it is rough going. But it is always nice to learn you have neighbors you never knew you had.

Tags: DC Storms, Power Outages

All I can say about yesterdays ruling from the USSC is we now know for sure the only way to fix our economy and country is to dismantle the federal behemoth.  I don’t have a clue what drove Roberts to apparently switch is vote and let stand a ‘punishment’ tax for not procuring a specified element of commerce, but whatever it was borders on madness.

In what some have excused as an act of trying to not be a political, Roberts allowed politics to completely twist simple guiding principles into a incoherent mess. Supposedly the Commerce Clause was a step too far to impose commerce, but tax penalties are not???

And this was never a tax bill. Some have given the ludicrous excuse that by gutting a House Tax bill and filling it’s Congressional Tracking Number with Obamacare contents never once voted on by the House this was a way around the constitutional requirement. Sorry Allahpundit, but this is pure idiocy. If all it takes to get around constitutional law is a new cover on the legislation then we should toss the whole Constitution in the trash. This kind of excuse is what I expect to hear out of 5 years olds, not serious adults.

Roberts was overtaken by some pressure or inside-beltway nuance that, when viewed from the clarity of Middle America, is transparently warped. I have never seen such a crock. Anthony Kennedy seems to have penned the only cogent assessment of Obamacare overall. I will let reader Mara Harley’s comments fill out what how I feel about this mess (emphasis mine).

All but Ginsberg (in her supplemental) agreed the Commerce Clause was an constitutional overreach of Congressional authority… the only brief candle in a sea of dark in this.

Majority plus Roberts own opinion then turned to the “was it a tax” argument. The Chief Justice engaged in judicial contortionist manuevers, using precedents that when there can be two interpretation of a law, one of them being constitutional and the other not, the High Court must examine the end result of the law, within what authority exists, even tho Congress erroneously ID’d it’s power or intent in the legislation itself. (see pg 37 of the doc). Or:

And it is well established that if a statute has two possible meanings, one of which violates the Constitution, courts should adopt the meaning thatdoes not do so. Justice Story said that 180 years ago: “No court ought, unless the terms of an act rendered it unavoidable, to give a construction to it which should involve a violation, however unintentional, of the constitution.” Parsons v. Bedford, 3 Pet. 433, 448–449 (1830). Justice Holmes made the same point a century later: “[T]he rule issettled that as between two possible interpretations of a statute, by one of which it would be unconstitutional and by the other valid, our plain duty is to adopt that which will save the Act.” Blodgett v. Holden, 275 U. S. 142, 148 (1927) (concurring opinion).

Thus had Roberts not considered this precedents, we’d all be having an entirely different conversation.

This is where the dissenting judges argue differently. First, the Commerce Clause infringement, plus the overt intent of Congress by putting the mandate/penalty in Title I of the Act, instead of Title IX of the Act where the revenue provisions reside, was effectively the nail in the coffin. It is not the judiciary’s responsibility to correct Congressional errors in legislation.

Speaking of correcting their errors, the dissenting judges took issue with the unconstitutionality of Sebelius withholding funds, or coercing the states, INRE the Medicaid Expansion. Roberts stated that could be corrected if they did not withhold the funds, since it didn’t alter the Medicaid program in it’s existing form.

The dissenting judges argued that judicial remedy is chutpah (obviously, my own applied term… LOL), and that when that provision was unconstitutional, it should be struck as a whole.

There is only one other small, weak battery flashing beam in this… on pg s 48-50, Roberts does issue a warning (with citation) that even the taxing power has limitations, stating that the “the power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits.” At this moment, the amount being discussed does not meet that threshhold, but it certainly was left open should Congress…as they always do… attempt to abuse that taxation power as it relates to this psudo “tax” that was really a “penalty” in legislative intent.

All in all, Roberts may have good citations to justify his hunt/peck to bail Congress out of their own deplorable legislative construction. But this whole things sucks…

I have been blogging about politics for coming on 7 years, and prior to that was immersed in heated discussions on the subject on various boards and forums for as along as I can remember. But now I have come to the conclusion “politics” is our cancer. As currently constituted, our government is completely dysfunctional and isolated from the citizenry. It lives in a fictional world and spends 90% of its energy trying to short cut the rules and collect power. The money apparently ain’t bad either. Some become ridiculously wealthy fleecing not only the taxpayers, but the descendants of the taxpayers for generations to come (just realize this is what today’s debt is, your children’s tax burden to make the powerful rich).

This is just the next glaring beacon to indicate why we need to tear down the federal beast. No more marginal efforts, promises of future fixes. No more deficits. No more free rides for endless failures.

America is better than that. We need to fire the lot of them and start over.

Update: Here it comes! The Affordable Care Act stands???

Good bye America, I barely knew you. Now we need Romney more than ever… – end update

I am in meetings this morning and will not be able to post immediately on the news, but there seems to be a consensus view that Obamacare will be significantly damaged today, if not completely destroyed.

Liberals (like E. j. Dionne) will wail and complain about democracy at work (Dionne called for Scalia to resign yesterday). It will be a sad parade of blaming others for their very unpopular socialist policies. Being the smartest people on the planet, the left will of course miss the point they are the ones who screwed up trying to shove their minority, naive view down the throats of a savvy, independent, American electorate.

These historically brilliant people missed the message of 2010, so I see no reason for them to get it now in 2012.

Anyway, either I will be eating crow come lunch or popping some champaign, and I am sure everyone is ready to get this thing over with, so have at it in the comments!

Update: Don’t buy the canard newly established norms in healthcare will immediately be pulled. Insurance companies know damn well if an aspect of Obamacare is popular they dare not remove it now, because their competitors will simply pick up a sizable chunk of their customers. So don’t buy into that Chicken-Little nonsense.

Tags: Obamacare, US Supreme Court

This post extends analysis I did in a previous post.

There has been a lot of excellent analysis in the blogosphere regarding George Zimmerman’s claims about the events surrounding his killing of young Trayvon Martin. Analysis clearly in line with the results of the police investigation and the prosecution’s case. While there are many discrepancies throughout Zimmerman’s tall tale, some are simply too big to ignore.

(1) There is no way GZ could pull his gun as described. On his back with his holster against his hip, his holster inside his waistband, while being pinned by TM who is supposedly straddling him. This position means TM”s legs are blocking access to GZ’s waist area (especially if he wiggles ‘downward’ through the straddling legs), as well as the ground and clothing making it impossible to reach and pull a gun. In this position you cannot pull a gun on a wet and rainy night without some evidence on the gun. But the fact is GZ’s elbow is too long to reach his waist since he claimed to be pinning TM’s arm while attempting this trick. Impossible (see below for why)

Update: For all the doubting Thomas’ out there, you can disprove this yourself.  Try and get your wallet of your pants laying on your back without raising you butt off the ground (this is within inches of where a holster would be inside a waste band).  Then have someone straddle you and try again – note where their legs are.  And finally, pin something under your right arm, have someone straddle you (with their weight on you) and try again.  While the picture above is static, your own experiment will do the trick. In the last case your elbow must bend to get to your back pocket, thus the laws of physics and biology disprove the reenactment by GZ. – end update.

(2) There is almost no GZ blood or DNA on TM. TM should be covered with blood or DNA from the punching and from the claimed suffocation attempt. But there is none.

(3) There is no TM blood or DNA on GZ, which there would be if he was shot while straddling over GZ. Blood would begin to flow and should be all over GZ.

(4) If TM was really banging GZ’s head on concrete, there should be some fractures in the skull. Apparently there are no injuries consistent with multiple hard blows to the head.

(5) Finally, the path of the bullet in TM’s body is not possible from the position described , and really is only possible if both men are standing AND GZ’s arm is extended straight.

When you look at the bullet path inside TM’s body it is pretty clear that this was not a shot from underneath, which would be the  angle if events transpired as Zimmerman claims. In fact, even standing the only way to get a gun that level is with your elbows locked straight out in a typical gun range position.

This post does a great job of highlighting some of these basic issues (and where I was able to collect the bullet path image)

You can’t break the laws of physics/biology/chemistry – this is not a fictional world. The crime scene evidence completely destroys GZ’s story, even before you get to issues like the timeline described vs the timeline recorded on the dispatch call, the lies about why GZ exited the car (to follow TM, not to read house numbers which were right in front of him). Basically, nothing beyond the fact he shot Trayvon appears to be true.

And why would GZ need to lie so much?

Because the truth is his actions led to the death of young Trayvon Martin.  That is the only reason to make up so much fiction.

Tags: Crime Scene, Evidence, George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin

I now understand why the charge against George Zimmerman is Murder 2 and not Manslaughter (as I originally thought would be proper). Whatever happened that night, it is nowhere near what GZ claimed in his numerous and shifting accounts. What I discovered in crime scene photos is undeniable. GZ’s lame attempts to preclude himself being anywhere off the sidewalk “T”  where Zimmermnan says the incident happened has been destroyed. The evidence tells a completely different and irreconcilable story. (note: crime scene photos below the fold)

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Tags: Crime Scene, George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin