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John and I found the protracted humiliation of Kevin McCarthy in connection with his election to be Speaker of the House a clown show. By contrast, Steve Hayward looked mostly on the bright side in “In re: Speaker McCarthy — dissents and concurrences.”
It is at least worth noting that the GOP majority is dissipating. The clown show set the stage for the shrinking of the small GOP House majority to a number asymptotically approaching zero.
It empowered Matt Gaetz to trigger the chain of events leading to McCarthy’s ouster from the Speaker’s chair. I decried that development in “Gaetz of Eden.” Has anyone asked Gaetz what good he did in sacking McCarthy?
McCarthy was deposed this past October. It seems like ancient history. McCarthy subsequently resigned his House seat effective December 31.
I have here in my hand a list of names. According to the list, among the Republicans getting out of Dodge with McCarthy are Reps. Bill Johnson (effective January 21), Ken Buck (effective yesterday), Mike Gallagher (effective April 19), and George Santos, whose departure was involuntary.
“Normally they’re trying to talk people out of [retiring],” one House Republican told Axios. “Now we’re at a point where we’re trying to talk them out of leaving early.” It may or may not be a portent of trouble for Speaker Johnson and it may or may not be a portent of the coming Democratic majority, but it’s not good.
We always hear a lot about the expense and difficulty of decommissioning nuclear power plants, but we seldom hear about the cost and difficulty of decommissioning wind mills, which only last half as long (if that much) as nuclear plants. Especially offshore wind, which is much more expensive to begin with. Here’s one estimate of the future problem:
JOHN adds: Offshore wind is possibly the stupidest way to generate electricity that has ever been devised. Someone should do the math, but I suspect it would make more sense to hire 10,000 men to walk on a treadmill. And liberals don’t clean up their own messes. There are already rotting hulks of wind turbines littering the landscape, often having been installed by now-defunct companies whose owners, long gone, have made off with the profits. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the billionaires who have gotten rich on government-mandated wind turbines to take down and dispose of offshore installations that have outlived their insanely brief useful lives. “Green” energy is, in multiple ways, the great scandal of our time.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Michael Ramirez posts his daily cartoons on Substack at the Michael Ramirez Newsletter. He is a conservative whose genius cannot be denied. Thus the Pulitzer. Readers can subscribe here.
Michael has also been writing weekly essays for his newsletter that I have posted in our Picks as each one was made freely accessible. Today Michael has posted an 18-minute video essay that is keyed to his recent cartoons on the Academy Awards. I found his remarks entertaining, interesting, and inspiring. He tells some inside stories and he talks about joining the protest at Columbia when he received his Pulitzer. He wraps up with a statement of his his core beliefs.
His is the voice of a free mind and a free man. I thought some readers might want to listen up.
Right now it seems the airlines (and especially Boeing aircraft) are suffering an epidemic of equipment failures and mishaps. Count me somewhat skeptical. I suspect the Alaska Air door frame blow out a few weeks ago, along with the tire falling off a United 777 the other day, has put the media on high alert, and now many episodes of mishaps and irregularities that might have gone unnoticed or unreported in the general media (the specialty aerospace press is a different matter—Aviation Week and Space Technology was a staple of my household’s magazine subscription pile when I was growing up, and it had lots of neat stories about aircraft problems) and are a source of headlines. (There is a second possibility: that standards for maintenance and manufacturing crews have been eroded on account of diversity mandates. . .)
Here’s the long-term data for mortality from airplane airframe-related accidents:
So Haiti is back in the news. As I mentioned yesterday, I thought the Clinton Foundation had fixed the place! Or Colin Powell in the 1990s. Or something. How soon until Biden sends in American troops? Or lets 500,000 Haitians come to America?
Anyway, Haiti is in the state of nature right now, with gangs and mobs rampaging. And yet, as a smart left-leaning friend of mine (I do have a few of those—opposition research) points out, the murder rate in Haiti is lower than many American cities:
Our pal Mark Perry reminds is that today, March 12, is “Equal Pay Day” that falsely assumes how far into 2024 the typical woman has to work to earn what her alleged male counterpart earned in 2023. Funny how feminists never consider something like “Equal Job Safety” or “Job Risk” day (Mark proposes “Occupational Fatality Day”), because the data looks like this and the “gap” would take years, not months, to close:
Men are 11 times more likely to die on the job than women. A rather different kind of femme fatale.
Chaser, FWIW (also from Mark):
Vaunce News 