FL State Plans New Clunker Appliance Program For Central AC Units

Florida’s wildly popular Cash for Clunker Appliances program soon will be reborn with a new twist: Rebates for clunker air conditioning systems.

State officials have approved a program that will give Floridians a flat fee rebate – yet to be determined — for new Energy Star-rated central air conditioning and air source heat pumps systems purchased before the end of the year, said Brenda Buchan, the chief analyst with the Governor’s Energy Office who managed the Energy Star appliance rebate program.

Window or room air conditioning units will not be included.

Buchan said Florida also is considering covering Energy Star hot water heaters in the new program but a decision has not yet been reached.

Source:

Debt to GDP, Highest Since WWII

STOP THE SPENDING — CBO: Debt to GDP to reach 62% this year, but don’t worry, it should stabilize around 67%. GDP to Debt has averaged about 36% since WWII. Happy yet? At that rate the debt can never be paid off.

The national debt will reach 62 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by the end of this year, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said Wednesday.

SAF Files Gun Suit In North Carolina

The Second Amendment Foundation on Monday filed a federal lawsuit in North Carolina, seeking a permanent injunction against the governor, local officials and local governments from declaring states of emergency under which private citizens are prohibited from exercising their right to bear arms.

Press release here:

Clarity

Monday’s decision by the Supreme Court did not GRANT a right  -  it affirmed the existing right to self defense. “Rights” are not granted by anyone – the Supreme Court simply affirmed an existing right. No governments, neither – federal, state nor local, can rescind a “right”.

Congress cannot create rights, neither to health care nor anything else.

Where your rights come from is laid out in the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

And those unalienable rights are spelled out in the Bill of Rights. The Second Amendment, the right of self defense.

Thomas Sowell: Gun control laws aren’t even necessary

Now that the Supreme Court has decided the Second Amendment to the Constitution means individual Americans have a right to bear arms, what can we expect?

Those who have no confidence in ordinary Americans may expect a bloodbath, as the benighted masses start shooting each other, now that they can no longer be denied guns by their betters. People who think we shouldn’t be allowed to make our own medical decisions, or decisions about which schools our children attend, certainly are not likely to be happy with the idea that we can make our own decisions about how to defend ourselves.

When you stop and think about it, there is no obvious reason why issues like gun control should be ideological issues in the first place. It is ultimately an empirical question whether allowing ordinary citizens to have firearms will increase or decrease the amount of violence.

Illegal People Movers

DPS spokesman Bart Graves says that Phoenix police followed a suspicious-looking Chevrolet pickup truck with a large piece of plywood in the truck bed — smugglers often use plywood to hide people in truck beds.

The driver and another occupant were heading to a house in a newer Phoenix neighborhood near 83rd Avenue and Lower Buckeye Road.

When police pulled up, the two men in the truck took off on foot and were caught a few moments later. Police found 44 men and 7 women being held inside the house. A total of 53 people were detained.

More here:

ObowmaSpill: Day 71

National oil spill Command announces US will accept offers of assistance from 12 countries and international organizations help. Hah, towels for pelicans maybe ?

I sure am glad it’s nothing serious, like by now, after 9/11 Afghanistan would be flat.

We’ll open this up with a quick recap on what we’re dealing with, thanks to Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit — Scoring the Obamaspill to date::

It didn’t have to be this way. The Dutch have equipment that would have prevented any oil from reaching shore but the federal government wouldn’t allow them into the Gulf.

** The feds only accepted assistance from 5 of 28 countries a month after the disaster.
** It took the Obama Administration 53 days to accept help from the Dutch and British.
** It took them 58 days to mobilize the US military to the Gulf.
** The feds shut down crude-sucking barges due to fire extinguisher concerns.
** The Obama Administration ignored oil boom manufacturers that have miles of product stockpiled in their warehouses.
** They only have moved 31 of 2,000 oil skimmers to the disaster area off of Florida.
** Florida hired an additional 5 skimmer boats to operate off its coast due to federal inaction.
** There are no skimmer boats off the coast of Mississippi.
** The massive A-Boat skimmer won’t be allowed to join the cleanup effort until the Coast Guard and the EPA figure out whether it meets their standards.
** The feds shut down sand berm dredging off the Louisiana coast.
** The president continues to hit the golf course, ball games, hold BBQ’s and party while the crude oil washes up on shore.

If you read the EPA oil spill emergency plan, you find they cite speed of response, and containment of the oil offshore. ‘At all costs’, says the EPA spill plan, ‘the oil is to be kept off the shore and out of estuaries’. After the Exxon Valdez spill, it became obvious to everyone what needed to be done. Well almost everyone. BUT — Now it is what it is. That’s what you get when you elect a community organizer as president. Can’t do much about fixing that obvious oversight until 2012.

Dumber Things Have Been Proposed

During the ice is coming crisis of the late 1970s, the eco-nuts were proposing to dump the now known pollutant carbon black on the earth’s polar regions to warm them up. Stopping the impending doom of the coming ice age. Then our crazed sex poodle discovered the world wasn’t going to freeze after all, and was in fact going to melt with us on board. So now we have the opposite side of the equation, paint the world white.

what exactly did this eco-nut invent, because I think painting is already taken.

Inventor paints mountains white to combat climate change:

The painters who have already completed two hectares of a planned 70 have been recruited from Licapa village, which depends on the run-off from the mountain for its water

By painting the mountains, Eduardo Gold hopes to replicate the effect of Andean glaciers, which reflect back sunlight and hence heat back through the atmosphere.

The technique is scientifically plausible and, according to some scientists, may be the only method of lowering global temperatures in a crisis.

Nuts are just well, you know, nuts. Some are crazed sex poodles.

A-Whale Won’t Help: EPA Denies A Whale Operating Permit

Heritage reports on the problem with the giant skimmer:

The A-Whale is the essence of an international ship—built in South Korea, modified in Portugal, owned by Taiwanese and flagged in Liberia.  And that is part of the problem.  Even if it stays farther offshore than the 3-mile limit of America’s Jones Act, it still requires approval by the U.S. Coast Guard and Environmental Protection Agency before BP can hire the A-Whale and put it to work.

The second problem is that the ship would gather spilled oil, separate the water from the oil, and discharge the water back into the ocean so its tanks could be filled with oil.  Our EPA has a problem with that, because the discharge would retain a minor amount of oily residue.  To EPA, any residue greater than 15 parts per million is impermissible.  They elevate perfection above the need for speed.

So there you have it America, you can’t remove 99% of the oil, because it can’t remove 99.999985%. The ship is said to be able to remove 99.999950% of the oil.

I’d rather be dealing with a little oily residue than the gunk washing up on the shores and into the wetlands now.

Instead, let’s coat the beaches and estuaries with oil. Makes sense to Obowma.

Is Enthusiasm Gap Replacing The Generic Ballot Gap ?

The enthusiasm gap is now +28 GOP ….

The 1994 election delivered a 53 seat pickup to House Republicans and gave us an understanding of the value of generic ballot surveys. This is a measure of whether Americans will vote for a Democrat or Republican in the next Congressional election.