Catching Up On News After Being Out And About All Day

PIMCO: CEO abruptly resigns; ensuing acrimony between CEO and co-founder Bill Gross.

President Obama will fly to Saudi Arabia in a few weeks to try to patch up things with King Abdullah. Another apology tour, no doubt.

New Jersey joins Texas and Arizona: Tesla cannot sell directly to consumers; must go through dealers.

The New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission voted Tuesday to ban the direct sale of automobiles in New Jersey, forcing electric-car maker Tesla to use dealers instead.

The vote makes New Jersey makes it the third state after Arizona and Texas that will not allow Tesla to sell its vehicles directly to customers.

Tesla will no longer sell electric cars in New Jersey, effective April 1, according to Dow Jones.

When this reaches the US Supreme Court, it will be interesting to see how Ms Sotomayor "votes." 

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Global Warming/ObamaCare

24-hour climate warming talkathon -- nothing more than an ObamaCare diversion.

The nation seems to be passing through a period in which too many U.S. Senators have been elected without so much as a high school level understanding of what drives the Earth’s climate and it isn’t the 0.038% of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.

On Monday, March 10, some twenty of them will stay up overnight on the Senate floor, according to The Hill, “to bring attention to the impacts of climate change.”  You don’t get more idiotic than that. Climate, measured in decades and centuries, is always in a state of change. Meanwhile, the weather anywhere in the nation, determined by the changing seasons and responsive only to short-range forecasts, has turned colder thanks to a cooling cycle that is now into its 17th year.

GE to supply 213 megawatts of turbines for European wind farms -- and so it goes.

 ... but no one knows how many enrollees are actually pay their premiums....

The Obama administration said on Tuesday that 4.2 million people have signed up for private health insurance under Obamacare, and indicated that total enrollment could surpass a 6 million-enrollee forecast by the end of March.

It looks like things are going from bad to worse for the ObamaCare health exchange in Hawaii.

Hawaii lawmakers are proposing charging a fee to insurers that are not participating in the state's insurance exchange under President Barack Obama's federal health care overhaul.

The fee would help prop up the financially troubled Hawaii Health Connector. The exchange has enough money to cover its bills for this year — but not beyond that, without some help.

The Hawaii market isn't big enough for health insurers to stick around. Watch for more insurance policy cancellations if this goes into effect.

The house of cards is starting to fall (no, not ObamaCare, but global warming). Even The New York Times is coming around to that conclusion, albeit slowly.  The California drought, according to The New York Times, is not likely due to global warming.

In short, the drought gripping California has been observed before. And it has occurred principally because of a lack of rain, not principally because of warmer temperatures. Indeed, it should be quite familiar to anyone who lived in California in the mid-1970s, as I did. We can also say with high confidence that no appreciable trend toward either wetter or drier conditions has been observed for statewide average precipitation since 1895. This drought is not part of a long-term drift toward reduced precipitation over the state.

What’s different this time, however, is that the demand for water has greatly increased in the state, and it may very well be that the current stress created by the failed rains is more severe than for similar rainfall deficits 40 years ago. It is at least intuitive that growth patterns, population increases and the rising value of the state’s agricultural sector have increased California’s vulnerability to drought and reduced its resiliency — that is, the state’s ability to adapt and cope with less precipitation.