Friday Open Thread

Welcome to your Friday open thread. Happy Friday to all! I’m ready for the weekend!

That Grover Norquist is a classy guy. He had some words for Republicans who cast a vote for show on ending ethanol subsidies.

Nealy every Republican lawmaker in Washington has signed Norquist’s anti-tax pledge, in which they vowed to never raise taxes, unless offset by other tax cuts. But Feinstein’s bill ends ethanol’s tax breaks without cutting taxes elsewhere, so Norquist dubbed it a “tax increase.”

And Norquist is livid. In an interview with the National Review, the influential lobbyist slammed Coburn, with whom he’s publicly feuded for some time, for taking Republicans’ tax hike “virginity”:

Norquist [said the vote was] essentially a gateway drug that would inevitably lead to additional [tax] increases down the road. “He said, ‘Ha ha, popped your cherry, lost your virginity. Now give me $2 trillion in tax increases,’” Norquist says. “As soon as they voted, he turned around and called them sluts. Guys like that didn’t get second dates in high school.”

It would be a great thing for the country if Republicans broke the stranglehold of Grover Norquist and the no-tax-ever crowd. Perhaps the pressure of numerous opinion polls showing Americans favoring some tax increases is getting to them. Let’s keep the pressure on!

Isn’t it something – oil companies are spending billions of dollars on think tanks and politicians denying climate change, but are quietly spending money studying the issue.

With climate change come the obvious gotchas: Not all drilling platforms were built with rising seas in mind, not to mention hypercanes, landicanes, and all the other types of neologistic extreme weather that come with a warming planet.

So the oil and gas industry hired climate experts to assess how prepared it was for global warming. Their conclusions: A) criminally underprepared and B) severe weather is only the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg. It turns out, for example, that the permafrost under the Alaska oil pipeline is rapidly thawing, leading to all kinds of enormously expensive structural damage and even a re-think of the design of its support structure in some regions.

That story just makes me sad. We are in some kind of strange era of political correctness where climate change must not be mentioned. Things would really change if business leaders would acknowledge the issue.