Loose Ends (22)

Kate Kate O’Beirne, RIP. Kate O’Beirne was a neighbor during the decade I Iived in McLean, Virginia, and she always reminded me of how Churchill described meeting Franklin Roosevelt: “like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.”  Kate was exactly like that. I can’t add much to the remembrances from her media colleagues such as John O’Sullivan, Mona Charen, and Ramesh Ponnuru, and Jim Geraghty, who described Kate’s TV demeanor as “a cross between Katharine Hepburn and a velociraptor.” Just so. They don’t make them like her any more.

 

March for Science fallout? Dr. Roy Spencer reports on Facebook this morning:

There were 7 bullet holes found this morning on John Christy’s side of our building [at the University of Alabama], and only on his floor. There was a local March for Science here on Saturday which went right past our building (I doubt the shots were fired during the march). That’s all I know at this point…the police have been interviewing John and others…I’m in a different part of the building. I’m the last one to believe conspiracy theories, but this seems to be more than coincidence.

Christy is a well-known climate skeptic.

 

So it’s Le Pen vs. Macron. It is widely assumed that Macron will win in a landslide; the Nate Silvers of the world are giving Le Pen only a 1 percent chance of winning. (That’s a gag: Silver, even as late as 8 pm on election night, was still rating Hillary at least a 2 to 1 favorite over Trump. So you never know.) Macron sounds like he ought to be a Marvel comic superhero, but of course as a supposed “centrist” he represents more of (no)-business-as-usual for France; in other words, more kryptonite for the French economy, which means another five years of stagnation and drift. At which point it is possible that Le Pen might win a majority.

 

Meanwhile, over in Germany, where it was just reported that 330,000 German households had their electricity shut off last year (translation here) because people can’t afford to pay the skyrocketing prices, the Green Party is slowly sinking in the polls ahead of the fall election:

Green Party

Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (an ex-member of the German Green Party from his mis-spent youth) helpfully translates:

Meanwhile, their support in the polls is approaching the parliamentary five percent hurdle. On Sunday, the opinion research institute Emnid presented its latest survey. According to the pollsters, the Greens are now on only six percent – the worst support the Institute has measured for the party in 15 years. Despite the current debate on the meaningfulness of polls, the survey is frightening for the Greens. Forsa and Insa also estimate only six percent support for the party. And in North Rhine-Westphalia, where a new state parliament is elected in May, the prospects for the Green Party are just as bad.

It is not so long ago that the Greens debated whether they were already a big tent party. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011 the polls saw them on 25 percent while the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg elected a green as prime minister.  No one expected at the time that the party would fear not to get into the next German parliament by failing to jump the five percent hurdle.

More from the NoTricksZone:

German politician Eva Bulling-Schröter of the Left Party has called it “a silent catastrophe“.

Not only have the poor been broadsided by the high electricity prices, but so have energy intensive industries. This all makes many average workers uneasy. Over the past years a number of German plants have been moving their operations to less expensive locations abroad, especially in the chemical industry. Traditional power companies have also been getting creamed, seeing billions of losses and thousands of layoffs. 6.2 million threats to cut off service were made!

T-online cites the German Bundesnetzagentur, adding that in 2015 also 44,000 households saw their natural gas turned off. T-online adds that millions more have been threatened with the loss of electric power: “Power cut-offs were threatened 6.2 million times. The average outstanding amount that electricity providers demanded from the impacted households was 119 euros.”

According to Bulling-Schröter: “Energy poverty in Germany is a silent catastrophe for millions of people, especially in the cold and dark winter months.”

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