DAVID KRAYDEN: Happy days are here again—Trump’s victory might have saved America

President-elect Donald Trump. Have to get used to saying that again. At least for a little over two months before his Jan. 20, 2025 inauguration.

Many people didn’t believe that Trump could pull this off, losing so bitterly four years ago to a guy who spent his entire election campaign in the basement of his Delaware house. The signs of President Joe Biden’s creeping dementia were obvious even then, as obvious as why his Democratic handlers didn’t want Biden to appear at any event that wasn’t carefully controlled and choreographed.

Trump has had many detractors. The half-wits who pass for journalists on most of the legacy media continue to repeat the noxious lies about his being a Nazi, a new Hitler, a fascist, a “dictator from day one,” a racist, a rapist, etc, etc. No presidential candidate or former president has ever been subject to such a barrage of chronic abuse from morons who all claimed Biden was sharper than a tack even as he waved to ghosts and welcomed people who weren’t there at official events.

No Republican presidential nominee has had to endure the whining and distraction of RINOs and liberals pretending to be GOP faithful the way Trump has. From the Lincoln Project to failed Rep. LIz Cheney (R-WY), Trump has not just taken the punishment, he’s heartily laughed at it.

The so-called moderates who view Trump with such overweening suspicion and outrageous disrespect actually view him as a usurper who has come and taken away their political party. But ironically, without Trump there might even be a Republican Party and there certainly wouldn’t have been a Republican president after Barack Obama left office. The Republican establishment got together after the defeat of Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) in 2012 and essentially decided that there was no way a GOP candidate could defeat the Democrats in a presidential race. The numbers just weren’t there. Yes, Republicans could still aspire to take a majority of House seats and certainly dominating the Senate wasn’t out of the question. But the presidency? The Democrats had the Electoral College sewn up and there was no way go back.

Trump has destroyed that scenario by changing the party from an Ivy League frat house of rich elites obsessed with setting the world on fire with foreign wars to a conservative expression of populism that celebrates individual initiative, small government, equality not equity, freedom of speech and assembly, free enterprise and the right to bear arms. It is a party that actually cares about the working class sharing in American prosperity – not through redistribution of wealth but by creation of wealth. It has become a party that wants to tell government at all levels to mind its own business and to stop intruding into our lives to such an incapacitating degree. Stop taking my money and “investing” it in your programs that only create debt and bureaucracy. Stop telling me how to raise my children, what religious faith you think is acceptable and what I should think is normal sexual behavior. Just get out of the way.

Trump’s victory on Wednesday morning was both an exaltation of individual freedom and a repudiation of the nanny state that has encroached upon our lives and our basic freedom. Could the nation have survived a President Kamala Harris who was poised to grant amnesty to tens of millions of illegal immigrants. Could it have survived more inflationary spending that has turned the dollar into the northern peso? Could it have survived the continuation of wars in Ukraine and Gaza that seem tailor-made to provoke a Third World War and nuclear conflagration with Russia? The answer is no.

When the results came in Tuesday night and it became apparent that Trump was going to win, I thought of President Gerald Ford’s remarks upon assuming command and control after President Richard Nixon’s resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal. He merely said, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” Of course, that assessment wasn’t entirely valid, not with Jimmy Carter waiting in the historical wings, but it was a word of optimism that seems particularly real right now. As real as Donald Trump can be and as real as Kamala Harris could never be.

If you saw her concession speech, it must have been apparent that this was probably the first time this woman has ever spoken from the heart or even as an individual. She has always been scripted, not perfectly scripted of course because her words have never risen to the level of eloquence and rarely above a dismal word salad. But she seemed to grasp a moment of sincerity and I could almost believe that she really was almost happy that Trump had beaten her because now we could get back to national prosperity, a real border and trading with other nations instead of going to war with them.

It’s not that we’re only getting Trump either. We are getting the Avengers, the dynamism of political personalities like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk. This is a glorious moment in American history to confirm the truth of the Constitution and even the Declaration of Independence. The only danger we face is that the usual suspects of the Military- Industrial Complex will be slumming at the White House, looking for work. On Wednesday, I watched the new and improved former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appear on Fox to wave his resume and advertise his interest in returning to a new Trump administration. This CIA assassin can go to hell and find a job working for Raytheon. Now is the time to reduce America’s corpulent intel and security forces that continue to harass and target Americans. We may even find out who killed President John F. Kennedy.

But for the moment, let all Americans who love liberty, who are more concerned about America’s borders than Ukraine’s; who remember a United states where you were allowed to think and speak freely – let them rejoice that their country has another chance, another shot at freedom. Remember that any presidential election is evidence that the people have spoken. The people spoke loudly and clearly on Election Day. Let their will be done.

This Story originally came from humanevents.com

zerohedge
Economics , News , Politics , Science
November 22, 2024
2 views

Utility Companies Are Not On Our Side

Authored by Linnea Leuken & H. Sterlin Burnett via RealClearPolitics,

When electric power was a novel idea and just beginning to be adopted in urban centers, the industry had a Wild West feel to it as multiple companies strung wires, opened power plants, and sold electricity on an unregulated market. Competition was fierce, but state and local governments concluded that the inefficiencies and redundancies endangered the public and imposed higher costs.

So states set up service territories with monopolistic or oligopolistic service providers, who were entrusted with providing reliable power and sufficient reserve for peak periods in return for being guaranteed a profit on rates proposed by the utilities but approved or set by newly established state public utility commissions (PUCs). These commissions were charged with ensuring public utilities served the general public universally within their territory, providing reliable service at reasonable rates.

Much has changed since then. Politicians began to supplant engineers to decide, based on self-interested calculations, what types of power should be favored and disfavored, and what types of appliances and modes of transportation Americans could use. As the 21st century dawned, a new consideration entered the picture: Climate change.

Under the banner of combatting global warming, utilities were at first encouraged and then coerced into adopting plans and policies aimed at achieving net zero emissions of carbon dioxide. The aim of providing reliable, affordable power – the rationale for the electric utilities’ monopolies in the first place – was supplanted by a controversial and partisan political goal. Initially, as states began to push renewable energy mandates, utilities fought back, arguing that prematurely closing reliable power plants, primarily coal-fueled, would increase energy costs, compromise grid reliability, and leave them with millions of dollars in stranded assets.

Politicians addressed those concerns with subsidies and tax credits for renewable power. In addition, they passed on the costs of the expanded grid to ratepayers and taxpayers. Effectively, elected officials and the PUCs, with a wink and a nod, indemnified utilities for power supply failures, allowing utilities to claim that aging grid infrastructure and climate change were to blame for failures rather than the increased percentage of intermittent power added to the grid at their direction.

Today, utilities have enthusiastically embraced the push for renewable (but less reliable) resources, primarily wind and solar. PUCs guarantee a high rate of return for all new power source (wind, solar, and battery) installations, which has resulted in the construction of ever more and bigger wind, solar, and battery facilities. The costlier, the more profitable – regardless of their compromised ability to provide reliable power or the cost impact on residential, commercial, and industrial ratepayers.

A new report from The Heartland Institute demonstrates the significant financial incentives from government and financiers for utilities to turn away from affordable energy sources like natural gas and coal, and even nuclear, and instead aggressively pursue wind and solar in particular. All of this is done in the name of pursuing net zero emissions, which every single major utility company in the country boasts about on their corporate reports and websites. Reliability and affordability come secondary to the decarbonization agenda.

Dominion Energy is a good example, as they are one of the most aggressive movers on climate-focused policy. Dominion CEO Robert Blue speaks excitedly about government-forced transitions to a wind- and solar-dominated grid in interviews. During one interview with a renewable energy podcast, he said:

“[S]ometimes the government needs to focus on outcomes. We’re trying to address a climate crisis, and we are going to need to move quickly to do that.” In the same interview, he expressed enthusiasm about federal policy that would achieve a government-directed transition.

And why wouldn’t he? Dominion, like most utilities, is granted government tax credits and guarantees on returns for investing in large, expensive projects like offshore wind, the most expensive source of electric power. The bigger the project, the bigger the profit with guaranteed returns.

Also, onshore wind companies have received special “take limits” from the Fish and Wildlife Service to kill protected bald eagles and golden eagles, while prosecuting oil companies if birds are injured or killed on their sites.

Net zero policies are not the environmental panacea that climate change activists proclaim. Industrial-scale wind and solar use substantially more land than conventional energy resources, disrupting ecosystems and destroying wildlife habitats in the process.

And despite recent technological advances, wind and solar are still not dispatchable resources, meaning they cannot provide consistent power at all times needed. Refuting claims made by environmentalists and utilities that wind and solar are the cheapest sources of electric power, costs have risen steeply as the use of wind and solar has increased. Customers of Duke Energy in Kentucky, for example, are paying 78% higher rates in the wake of coal-fired plant closings.

Politicians and utilities are pushing for even more electrification for appliances and vehicles despite the fact that Federal Energy Regulatory Commission officials have repeatedly warned in recent years that adding more demand for electric power while replacing reliable power sources with intermittent renewables is destabilizing the power system.

It appears that the utilities prioritize short-term profits over grid reliability or keeping costs reasonable – and the government officials who are supposed to keep them in check are only encouraging them. It doesn’t need to be this way. The U.S. grid was not always this way. Only in recent years, with the obsessive pursuit of net zero, have rolling black and brownouts become so common.

Today, utility companies are sending lobbyists to conservative policymakers in order to convince them that the utilities have our best interests in mind. Their track record tells another story. Meanwhile, Americans have less reliable electricity at higher costs.

Linnea Lueken (llueken@heartland.org, X: @LinneaLueken) is a research fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/22/2024 – 06:30