Blog Awards

New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day usually prompt retrospectives over the past year, lists of “Best of” and “Worst of,” and other round-ups. Yesterday, Doug Ross’s Director Blue website announced its Top 50 blog awards for 2016. The full list plus reader comments is here.

One website singled out by a reader is Politipage. It’s a handy aggregator for accessing some of the top conservative-leaning blogs and sources of news & analysis. I just bookmarked it. Take a look.

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Happy New Year

art credit: www.happynewyears2017.org

from the Cleveland Tea Party 

Updates:Gov. Kasich (RINO) on renewable energy and other bills

art credit: redstate

In an article “Kasich Veto Draws Cheers From Environmental Lobby,” Steve Byas at The New American reports:

Once again, Ohio Governor John Kasich  used his veto power to kill yet another bill favored by conservatives in his state. On Tuesday, he killed a bill that would have made renewable energy benchmarks voluntary, rather than mandatory, for the next two years.

Kasich defended his action, saying, “Ohio workers cannot afford to take a step backward from the economic gains that we have made in recent years, however, and arbitrarily limiting Ohio’s energy generation options amounts to self-inflicted damage to both our state’s near and long-term economic competitiveness.” Of course, how suspending mandatory benchmarks imposed on electric companies would limit the companies’ “energy generation options," as opposed to doing exactly the opposite, Kasich did not explain.

Not surprisingly, the Environmentalist Lobby cheered Kasich, who ran for president this year as a Republican. The Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, National Audubon Society, and Ohio Consumers’ Counsel all praised the veto. The “benchmarks,” as they are called, were created by legislation in 2008, requiring electric companies to gradually obtain more energy from “renewable sources,” rather than being allowed simply to make a free market decision to buy the least expensive electricity.

Senator Bill Seitz (R-Cincinatti), however, was not pleased. “It is apparent that Gov. Kasich cares more about appeasing his coastal elite friends in the renewable energy business than he does about the millions of Ohioans who decisively rejected this ideology when they voted for President-elect Trump,” Seitz said in a press release. “We can only hope that President Trump and his amazing cabinet of free market capitalists will save us from this regulatory overreach of Al Gore-style policies that take unnecessary money out of ratepayers’ pockets.”

Seitz said he would move to totally repeal the mandates in the next legislative session.

Kasich made it clear by his veto that he does not trust the free market to sort out which type of energy source is best for Ohio consumers. This veto is a confirmation for many more conservative Republicans that Kasich is simply not a conservative.

Ohio legislators can return to Columbus to override this veto, if they wish. . .

During the Republican presidential contest, Kasich defended the implementation of controversial Common Core standards in his state, and attacked fellow Republican candidates who opposed them — fellow governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, as well as former Governor Mike Huckabee, and U.S. Senators Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. At the time, Donald Trump was not mentioned, although Trump also opposed Common Core, seen by conservative opponents as an attempt to nationalize public education.

There have been numerous other deviations from conservative principles by Kasich, including his backing of the expansion of Medicaid in Ohio under ObamaCare. When Kasich was in Congress, he was one of only 42 Republicans who voted for President Bill Clinton’s ban on assault rifles. He also favors granting U.S. citizenship to illegal aliens.

Clearly, Republican primary voters made a good decision to reject John Kasich for the Republican nomination for president.

And another item on the 2017 New Year’s Wish List to Columbus lawmakers: Pass the Ohio Health Care Compact.

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Dr. Thomas Sowell retires

art credit: Benjamin T Brixey

One of my favorite columnists, Dr. Thomas Sowell, is retiring. His farewell column is here. And here are a few take-aways from it:

Most people living in officially defined poverty in the 21st century have things like cable television, microwave ovens and air-conditioning. Most Americans did not have such things, as late as the 1980s. People whom the intelligentsia continue to call the “have-nots” today have things that the “haves” did not have, just a generation ago.

In some other ways, however, there have been some serious retrogressions over the years. Politics, and especially citizens’ trust in their government, has gone way downhill.

. . .

Years of lying presidents – Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Richard Nixon, especially – destroyed not only their own credibility, but the credibility which the office itself once conferred. The loss of that credibility was a loss to the country, not just to the people holding that office in later years.

With all the advances of blacks over the years, nothing so brought home to me the social degeneration in black ghettos like a visit to a Harlem high school some years ago.

When I looked out the window at the park across the street, I mentioned that, as a child, I used to walk my dog in that park. Looks of horror came over the students’ faces, at the thought of a kid going into the hell hole that park had become in their time.

When I have mentioned sleeping out on a fire escape in Harlem during hot summer nights, before most people could afford air-conditioning, young people have looked at me like I was a man from Mars. But blacks and whites alike had been sleeping out on fire escapes in New York since the 19th century. They did not have to contend with gunshots flying around during the night.

We cannot return to the past, even if we wanted to, but let us hope that we can learn something from the past to make for a better present and future.

Dr. Sowell is also a prolific author of books; he has made esoteric or downright boring subjects (such as economics) accessible and interesting. Check out some of them here. Most will be available at your local library. But his regular columns will be much missed.

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Merry Christmas

And so as Tiny Tim observed, 

art credit: Pinterest

Merry Christmas

 from the Cleveland Tea Party!

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Make Christmas Great Again

Bob Gorrell’s cartoon at Townhall:

Ohio Electoral College reports

cartoon credit: Margulies [okay, so it's 4 years old!]

Gateway Pundit posted this report on the Electoral College vote on Monday in Columbus:

Ohio GOP Delegate Casts Vote for TRUMP – Then Torches All of His DNC Troll Letters in Yard Pit

Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones received HUNDREDS of harassing letters from Hillary trolls begging him [to] reject Donald Trump.

Sheriff Jones ignored the letters, emails and phone calls and voted for Donald J. Trump for President on Monday in Columbus, Ohio.

Then he went home and dumped his pile of letters into a yard pit. Poured lighter fluid on the pile. … And torched them all.

Sheriff Jones posted the videos on Twitter . . . [scroll down on GP website here]

And in the comments section, we find some photos of the Sheriff and Cleveland Tea Party’s own Ralph King, who also served as a member of the Electoral College and cast his vote on Monday for Donald J. Trump:

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