Camel Through A Needle

Dog Times
California utilities are under legislative mandate to get 33% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. The state's own watchdog, the Division of Ratepayer Advocates, issued a report complaining that utilities have been rushing to sign overpriced contracts that have already locked-in $6 billion in above-market costs for California electricity users. According to the watchdog, 59% of contracts feature a price at least half-again higher than available conventional energy. (Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., WSJ, 1/15/2013)

Already scheduled to come to Vermont: higher energy prices. Every dumb idea from California - a state teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and from which both people and businesses are fleeing - will make its way to Vermont. Once implemented, Vermont - given its size - will crumble quickly.  


Face Off
The president, facing criticism over his potential use of executive action to push multiple gun control measures, will be joined by children who wrote him letters about gun violence and school safety at a press conference shortly before noon on Wednesday. (Foxnews.com, 1/16/2013)

Likely not to be included were the children who begged for an armed guard to be stationed at their school. Another reminder of the absolutely despicable way that Liberals will politicize children. We saw it in the videos of teachers leading their charges in tuneful odes to "Dear Leader Obama" and again at the capital in Wisconsin protesting the governor. 


Irregardless
The country needs a solution that limits the killing power of civilian weapons across the board — regardless of action type — while keeping enforcement costs and social unrest to a minimum. Luckily, we already have it: magazine control.

The magazine is the part of the gun that holds the cartridges. The standard magazine for a 9mm semiautomatic handgun holds 17 rounds. Assault-weapon magazines typically carry 30. Those magazines drop out at the press of a button, to be replaced by fresh ones.

Let’s replace them with smaller ones. Lower-capacity magazines will fundamentally transform the character of these guns. Put a five-round magazine in an AR-15 and you no longer have an assault-style weapon. You have the world’s ugliest varmint rifle. A Glock becomes a plastic six-shooter, capable of holding a burglar at bay but not capable of a Virginia Tech-style rampage. (Jason Ross, Washington Post, 1/15/2013)

Jason Ross ("a writer living in New York") gives us this ditty on how smaller magazine cartridges are going to save lives. Sorry, we still don't get it. Ross himself says that magazines "drop out at the press of a button." This means both the large capacity magazines now available or the smaller ones (five rounds) that he proposes. So the only thing that will result from Ross's "solution" is that madmen like Lanza will have to change magazines more frequently. Remember it can be done "at the press of a button!" Given that schools proudly advertise themselves as gun-free zones (how's that working out?) the extra time required to reload is not likely to save a single life. An armed school guard would.