Alan K. Henderson's Weblog

LC Gladiator says:

Yes, we were, Glad, and as always we were exactly right.

We said, numerous times, that a business that can’t stay in the black doesn’t need to be in business, that they need to make room for a business that can. A business that, funnily enough, would also be able to provide far better jobs for their employees.

And we were met with the usual leftist swine (and I refuse to call them “liberals”, call the parasites by their proper name, dammit) mantras of “if we don’t bail out GM, those workers will never ever work again and this will crush our economy!!!!11!!!!” which is, of course, total and utter bullshit.

The leftist swine were trying to tell us that if GM stopped making GM cars, then the demand for GM cars would just auto-magically disappear and everybody would decide to either buy Japanese or walk to work. Right. Just like having the dairy industry take a kick to the shorts for being inefficient would suddenly make Americans, all 300 million of us, stop drinking milk.

And now Deej is telling us that Twinkies won’t go away just because Hostess is going away. He’s right, for once. They won’t. Somebody else, somebody who isn’t buried under an unsupportable union weight of paid vacations, plush pensions etc. WILL buy that trademark and continue to make them.

The question left for us is, then: Why are Twinkies so much different from Dodges, much like another good question for the leftist morons is “why is oil and gas, unlike every single other commodity in the world, exempt from the laws of supply and demand?”

The answer is: “Lefties are fucking morons and if they ever open their yaps, your smartest move is to assume that they’re lying.”

Here endeth the lesson.

Enron’s collapse bears some striking similarities to Solyndra, namely, a business model that increasingly depended on government support for profitability. When that government support didn’t come in time, Enron’s house-of-cards collapsed.

After the World Bank declined to fund the Dabhol project, U.S. government entities provided key funding for the project. OPIC ultimately supplied Dabhol with a total of $160 million in loan guarantees and $200 million in risk insurance. The Export-Import Bank provided a roughly $300 million loan in late 1994.89 (Of this, $202 million is outstanding, but four Indian banks have guaranteed the loan, eliminating any risk to U.S. taxpayers, according to an Export-Import Bank spokesperson.)

In addition, numerous Clinton Administration officials supported the project. For example, Commerce Secretary Brown wrote to India’s minister of Commerce before a January 1995 trip to India, asking the minister to facilitate “financial closing” of the Dabhol project “in time to be celebrated during my visit.” Once in India, and accompanied by Ken Lay, Secretary Brown oversaw the signature of loan agreements by Dabhol Power Company with U.S. Export-Import Bank and OPIC. In visits to India, Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary expressed Washington’s concern that India stand by commitments to investors. For example, Secretary O’Leary warned India that it was hurting its reputation with foreign investors.

Here’s the salient point: like Solyndra, Enron was a favorite of environmentalists, and Enron was a huge backer of the Kyoto Protocol. A decade ago, people liked to talk about links between Enron’s chairman, Ken Lay, and President George W. Bush. But they leave out that the main thing Lay was urging on Bush was the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. Enron probably would have fared much better under a Gore administration. Enron thought they’d make money on the trading operations from a cap and trade scheme. After Enron’s collapse, an internal memo from the late 1990s came to light that said Kyoto would “do more to promote Enron’s business than almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States,” and concluded that Kyoto would be “good for Enron stock.”

Pickens said the wind farm project was scuttled partly because of the lack of adequate transmission lines to carry the electricity from remote locations to cities, according to the paper.

The oil tycoon had hoped to build new transmission lines but could not secure financing, the paper said.

"Tuna is a very expensive fish," Takagi said. "One tuna can easily cost more than 1 million yen ($11,000).

In the past eight years, New York City has experienced an unprecedented construction boom, with $29 billion of building forecast for 2009, an 83 percent increase from $16.4 billion in 2000, according to the New York Building Congress, an association of developers, architects and vendors.

Hey, I want to talk about our governor out here, Governor Kathleen Sebelius, who James Carville last year said should be at the top of the list for running mate for Barack Obama; which also would be a white women. So probably -- instead of Hillary, he can always grab Kathleen. Well, in the last two months Kathleen has blocked a coal-fired plant that was going to be a three-and-a-half-billion-dollar investment in western Kansas, which is suffering, and the health department approved the plan. She vetoed the plan on her own, and on top of that, there was an oil company out of Texas -- Hyperion, you can do a word search -- that was going to put a $10 billion oil refinery in my county, and they said because Kathleen Sebelius just flippantly used carbon emissions and global warming as her reason for rejecting the coal-powered plant -- even though it met federal regulations -- they said they were not going to come to Kansas and put in $10 billion, so we lost $14 billion.