Thursday roundup

Leon Wolf at RedState gets to the heart of the matter of Squirrel-Hair's waffling on immigration: eventually those high-profile Bots who made the issue their pet obsession will attempt to wash their hands of the S-H defeat by claiming he went mushy on it. But that won't be why he loses, since most Pub voters don't place a high priority on it:

Trump is losing Virginia and Colorado by double digits, and Trump simply does not have a path to victory without those states. In other words, on the day Trump made his "pivot" on immigration, he was already on the path to a virtually certain total defeat.

Here are the facts that people like Coulter do not like to acknowledge: illegal immigration is not a big deal to most people in this country. Polls consistentlyshow that "illegal immigration" is the main concern of about 6-8% of voters, which puts it barely within the top 10 of issues voters care about; and even among those voters, Hillary wins nearly half - which makes sense. For some portion of the people who view immigration as their most important issue, Trump is (or has been, until yesterday) about the worst candidate imaginable.

Here's how disconnected from reality the Ingrahams and Coulters are from the actual real world in which people live - as Dan McLaughlin noted here before in an exhaustive post, "amnesty" (as they define it) is a majority position among Republican primary voters. That particular majority, however, tends to be the actual silent majority; the "deport them all and let God sort them out" wing is the loud, obnoxious, more single-minded minority. Trump isn't going to lose the election because he is taking a position that is opposed by only a minority of voters in his own party and is supported by huge margins among the population at large, and it's absurd to suggest otherwise.

Bottom line is that a year from now, some yahoo is going to come up to you and suggest that the reason Trump lost the election is because he softened on immigration. Just know that the reason they are telling you this is because they are wanting to sell you more books about how, if everyone only listened to them, Republicans would win elections and everything would be great again. It sounds tempting, but it just isn't true.

Eli Lake at Bloomberg says a comprehensive look at the Most Equal Comrade's Iran policy since he's had his grip on post-America's throat explains why he sat on his hands when the 2009 uprising at least increased the possibility of getting rid of the Islamic Republic regime with its grip on Iran's throat: The MEC was obsessed with a legacy as a lightworker, a visionary astride the globe bringing unicorns, rainbows and an era of a true "international community" to humankind:

Obama from the beginning of his presidency tried to turn the country's ruling clerics from foes to friends. It was an obsession. And even though the president would impose severe sanctions on the country's economy at the end of his first term and beginning of his second, from the start of his presidency, Obama made it clear the U.S. did not seek regime change for Iran.  

It's debatable whether the U.S. ever did support such a policy. But it's striking the lengths to which Obama went to make good on his word. As Solomon reports, Obama ended U.S. programs to document Iranian human rights abuses. He wrote personal letters to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei assuring him the U.S. was not trying to overthrow him. Obama repeatedly stressed his respect for the regime in his statements marking Iran's annual Nowruz celebration.

His quest to engage the mullahs seems to have influenced Obama's decision-making on other issues too. When he walked away from his red line against Syria's use of chemical weapons in 2013, Solomon reports, both U.S. and Iranian officials had told him that nuclear negotiations would be halted if he intervened against Bashar al-Assad.

Obama eventually did get a nuclear deal with Iran. Solomon's book shines in reporting the details of the diplomacy that led to the 2015 accord. American diplomats held two sets of negotiations with Iran -- one public channel with the British, Chinese, European Union, French, Germans, Russians and the United Nations -- and another, bilateral track established through the Sultanate of Oman. In 2013, U.S. officials shuttled on public busses between two hotels in Geneva to conduct the two tracks before telling their negotiating partners about the formerly secret channel to Iran.

Eventually, the Iranians wore down the U.S. delegation. At the beginning of the talks in 2013, the U.S. position was for Iran to dismantle much of its nuclear infrastructure. By the end of the talks in 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry and his team "agreed that Iran would then be allowed to build an industrial-scale nuclear program, with hundreds of thousands of machines, after a ten year period of restraint."

Other U.S. red lines were demolished too. The final deal would allow the U.N. ban on Iranian missile development to phase out after eight years, and the arms embargo against Iran to expire after five. Iran would not have to acknowledge that it had tried to develop a nuclear weapon, even though samples the Iranians collected at its Parchin facility found evidence of man-made uranium.

The Oregon state legislature has an agenda of planned decline on steroids:

The green energy warriors have pretty much taken over the state legislature in the Beaver State for more than the past decade and they’ve managed to pass all sorts of interesting laws. One of them was a rule which says that all coal fired power will be eliminated by 2020… a deadline which is pretty much right around the corner. The Boardman Coal Plant is scheduled to shut down completely in the next few years and at that point there will be little besides wind turbines in terms of in-state power generation. What could possibly go wrong? (Fox News)

The massive coal-fired plant in Boardman, Ore., is just four years away from being shut down for good – at that point, Oregon coal production will be no more, after the state became the first in the nation to completely ban coal power.

The mandate, signed into law earlier this year, was the result of an environmentalist-fueled push by the Democrat-controlled legislature. Under the plan, coal production will end once the Boardman plant shutters in 2020 – utilities would still be able to buy coal power from out of state for another 10 years, until a 2030 deadline to end coal use entirely.

But the phase-out already has groups warning that residents are headed for big rate increases and brownouts.

The first thing the residents can prepare to do is tighten their purse strings. Energy generation remains in the realm of the free market and in order to comply with these state mandates, energy is going to cost more. The utility companies don’t simply suck up those increased costs, so they get passed on to the consumer. But if the citizens of the state are willing and able to pay energy bills which may double their current rates, that’s up to them I suppose. Of course, it’s the lowest income residents who will bear the brunt of that damage as usual.

But what will be more interesting to observe is not the bottom line people are paying, but if the lights will stay on at all. Coal currently provides more than a third of Oregon’s energy needs. The total energy provided by wind turbines accounts for… eight percent. And it’s a highly unreliable eight percent because that production drops to nearly zero every time the wind stops blowing. There are nowhere near the number of new wind turbine projects under construction right now to make up that gap even if you could ensure steady breezes blowing all year long.

"Science guy" my tail end:

William Sanford Nye’s scientific bona fides consists of an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell, and a stint at Boeing. But you can be anything you want on television, and in the late 1980s, hard at work pursuing a career in comedy, Nye landed a recurring bit as Bill Nye “the Science Guy” on Almost Live!, a Seattle-area sketch-comedy television show, and a role as Christopher Lloyd’s laboratory sidekick on Back to the Future: The Animated Series. Nye then leveraged that success into his namesake PBS Kids show, Bill Nye the Science Guy, which from 1993 to 1998 filmed 100 half-hour episodes, each focused on a particular topic (dinosaurs, buoyancy, germs, &c.) and accompanied by a parody soundtrack (e.g., Episode 75, on invertebrates: “Crawl Away,” by “S. Khar Go” — a parody of “Runaway” by Janet Jackson). Somehow, because of this, Nye is now the go-to authority on exoplanets and dark matter and whether we are living in a computer simulation — and, of course, environmental policy.

I may have more on the Squirrel-Hair immigration waffle later today. The schadenfreude is too delicious to resist, especially the fact that Coulter's book In Trump We Trust comes out the very week that this goes down.