Month: September 2021

For more than a decade we watched right wing zealot Zombies in the Republican Party eat its flesh, bore from within until – until the only result could have been Trump, until it became the thing it has become.

Now we see the “progressive” lumpen left proles of the Democratic Party gorging and gorged bloodily on their coveted cable television interviews as they turn a governing majority into a century-long failure.

Democracy cannot suvive zealots. Democracy lives at the center and Democrats lately have moved the center but still, that is not enough for its Zombie zealots who do not understand and do not care that democracy dies at the far extremes.

If the House “progressives” want to force Sinema and Mancin to choose sides and move toward the President then they need to get both bills passed now, right now. Passage of both will give the President and Schumer the leverage they need to press Sinema and Manchin.

Anyone with the least understanding of politics knows that.

To get something, you need something else. Right now the president and the speaker and the majority leader have almost nothing when they try to get the two recalcitrant senators to yield something.

But if they can hold two House-passed bill over the heads of the senators from Arizona and West Virginia they’ll deal. They’ll have to deal. Especially Sinema because she has to know if she does not she will get a primary and she will lose it. Before she can run parse the center in Arizona she has to give her state party what it wants and expects from a Democrat: Or Arizona Democrats and tens of thousands more around the country will take her out.

Manchin? He’s another deal. He’s from woebegotten West Virginia. He understands the place and knows how far he can go and yet keep the chance of going back to the Senate, where he knows Schumer has to suffer a lot of his being Joe Manchin to get his vote to maintain the majority.

But even Mancin can still go a long way if he has to but; but he just does not have to as long as there is no leverage against and over him. As long as his progressive party fellows do the lifting for him. If they won’t suport the president and the legislation, well then why should he? Why should he risk walking the plank in West Virginia?

Without two House-passed bills there isn’t and won’t be any leverage to use with Maching. Without the House passing both post-haste it is not his fault, it is the fault of the House “progressives.”

But House Democrats are being consumed by the disease of extremism and they will take the nation and its future with them unless – unless Ms. Pelosi, perhaps the greatest speaker in the history of the House, can save us from them and them from themselves and from the wrath of Democrats later.

I believe she will succeed this one last time. If she does not, it will not matter for another 30 years.

And I, like so many I know, will be long dead.

But my grandchildren, and yours, will be left to live in the rubble that AOC and the rest of her buddies will dance on, being interviewed on cable TV, which clearly is more important to them than getting this done.

They are far, far, far worse and far, far, far a danger to the future of the United States than Trump and his looney legions.

Those people are ignorant, stupid and failed. The Democratic progressives?

They are willfully arrogant and bent on political and governmental self-destruction because – because they do not understand politics because they come from places where they do not need to learn to understand it, because they have no sense of responsibility and – and because they would rather be on TV than actually get done what they holler about must be done.

After all, if you get it done, cable hosts don’t really need you anymore. Do they? No, they don’t.

And then – then you are a political Zombie.

Ford Motor Company has announced it will make the largest investment in its history, $11 billion to build three factories that will create 11,000 jobs to build electric cars.

It is part of the company’s plan to manufacture only electric vehicles by 2035.

That’s a good idea, in fact an essential industrial program motivated by the need to level climate change and provide the cars the public will come to expect to get going on that project of the century.

But there’s a catch or two right now – big ones. Where are you going to charge your electric car when there are multiple times more of those than gasoline powered cars like the one you drive now? And how long will it take to charge it?

At a charging station, right? But where are the charging positions to fuel tens of millions of vehicles in the United States every day?

Actually, they do not – do not – exist.

Depending on the source, there are about 165,000 gas stations in the United States.

Given that some have two gas pumps, some have four and some have 20 if we take an average of 10 at each station that would mean 1,650,000 gas pumps in the country.

The real number is probably far higher but let’s use that.

Depending on sources, there are fewer than 50,000 electric car charging positions in the U.S. and they are mostly of a kind that charge slowly, very slowly in fact compared to the time it takes to fill up a gasoline tank.

Do the math. If gasoline pumps and current electric fueling positions were comparable, and they are not for now because of technology, the deficit is 1.6 million positions. Let’s leave it to experts to come up with the actual figures but the illustration gives us a good layman’s notion of the gap.

Example: In New Jersey the law says if you sell gasoline to anyone, you have to sell it to evryone. That ‘s why a Costco gas station plaza in Mercer County New Jersey has to sell gasoline even to non-Costco members. That plaza by observation fuels thousand and thousands of vehicles every week. It has about 20 gasoline pumps. It does not seem to have an electric charge station.

Clearly, we are several million fast-charge positions away from what we will need in a very few years. nThe second big problem with electric car charging is time. By all estimate current technology can fully charge a car at a charging position in about 20 to 30 minutes. But if you are used to a two-miute gasoline fill-up, that does not fit your busy life.

Even if we reach a point in an unknown future when many if not most auto owners can fully charge their cars at home, then estimates say it now takes six to as many as 12 hours to do that. That’s not just not ideal, it’s no good. Advancing the technology has to move with the development of charging positions.

The pending infrastructure bill must be passed to encourage and provide support for that investment, one that in turn has to be made by the oil and auto industries with the kind of public incentivation provided by the infrastructure legislation.

It contains an initial federal contribution of $7.5 billion for charging positions. But measure that against an estimate from one source that puts the total amount needed to build a large enough national network of charging positions at $50 billion.

Ford can make all the electric cars it wants as it takes forward its plan to transition in 15 years to manufacturing only electric vehicles.

But can it sell electric cars if the charging stations to fuel them are few and far between and if the technology has not been advanced to make them reasonably comparable in efficiency to gasoline pumps?

With other automakers, like Tesla which already bulds its own, Ford will have to invest in electric charging stations.

We need the infrastructure bill now – right now.

Yesterday in fact and, if anything, we need more of it.

It is now illegal to be a woman in Texas.

If you see a woman in Texas, call a Republican.

Meantime, while everyone is rightfully worried about girls and women in Afghanistan, the Taliban has taken over Texas – and very probably the U.S. Supreme Court.