Welfare for the well-to-do

If you watch the Weather Channel, whenever one of the bad winter storms hits, or hurricanes, tropical storms, etc, you’ll see that they always have a graphic showing how many “customers” are without power. Customers does not equal people, but residential and commercial units consuming power. As ’empty nesters,’ we count as one customer, but are two people. When the first tropical storm/category 1 hurricane hit the Lone Star State earlier in July, the Weather Channel was telling us about how long customers in Texas were dealing with near 100ºF temperatures with no sparktricity for air conditioners. Primarily distributed by overhead wires, electricity is our most vulnerable to the weather utility.

Heat pumps are having their moment. Are they right for you?

More homeowners are opting for heat pumps, once thought to be ill-suited to cold Northeast winters.

by Frank Kummer | Monday, July 29, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

For decades, Scott Nelson’s Oceanside Service has been installing traditional residential cooling systems and gas-powered furnaces in Jersey Shore communities such as Long Beach Island.

Within the past few years, however, the Allenhurst-based contractor has seen a big change: More homeowners are opting for heat pumps, once thought to be ill-suited to cold Northeast winters. The switch is fostered by warming winters, more efficient heat pump units, and federal and state incentives.

“We give everybody the option,” Nelson said, referring to a traditional system versus a heat pump. “And 8 out of 10″ have been buying heat pumps.

Heat pumps are having their moment, boosted in recent years by federal tax credits and other incentives that align their cost more closely with traditional fossil-fuel powered units, while also being highly efficient.

And there it is! You, the taxpayers, are on the hook to buy HVAC systems for Other People! And the homeowners in “Jersey Shore communities such as Long Beach Island” are much wealthier than the typical taxpayer in Flyover Country USA. In June of 2024, the median sale price in Long Beach Island, NJ, was $2,250,000, up 32.4% from the same time in 2023.[1]Data accessed on July 29, 2024, and may show differently in the future, as the referenced real estate site updates information as it is received.

The momentum could grow with the Environmental Protection Agency’s announcement last week of $4.3 billion in grants for projects in 30 states aimed at reducing climate change and air pollution, fostering environmental justice, and accelerating a transition to renewable energy. Pennsylvania received nearly $400 million, and New Jersey and a coalition of other states received nearly $250 million, all funded by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) as part of the Biden administration’s agenda.

The grants will be used to fund various programs, including those that encourage a switch to heat pumps such as Pennsylvania’s Priority Climate Action Plan.

So, even more of your taxed-away dollars — or that money borrowed from investors and repaid with interest — being given to Other People.

Our HVAC system, a circa 1995 heat pump system, was destroyed in the 2021 flood, and the $6,100 it cost to replace it came from our pockets, not the taxpayers. Remember that $6,100 figure; it will be important later. How much moolah is Uncle Sam giving to people wealthier than you? Skipping down a few paragraphs we find:

Heat pump installations can quality for federal tax credits valued at up to 30% of the cost paid for the unit, or up to $2,000 per year, for air-source heat pumps. There’s a rebate up to $8,000 for an ENERGY STAR-certified electric heat pump for space heating and cooling.

Pennsylvania anticipates using money from the Infrastructure Act to offer rebates starting in 2025 for heat pumps installed in low- to moderate-income households.

Further down, readers are told that the up-front costs for a heat pump are about $15,000, versus roughly $8,000 for a gas furnace. I guess that my $6,100 wasn’t so bad, huh?

Philadelphia has plans to try and push heat pumps, but has 440,000 mostly brick rowhomes, with an average age of 80 years. Many have insufficient electrical service to power a heat pump system. My heat pump system has not one but two 220-volt, 50-amphere circuits, one for the exterior condenser unit, and another for the blower unit in the crawlspace, which includes heating elements for the ’emergency’ heat cycle. With our ‘backup’ heating system, a propane fireplace, we’ve never needed to use the ’emergency’ heat cycle. A modern, 200-amp circuit breaker panel is needed for installation of a heat pump system, so many of the Philly rowhomes would also need an electrician to upgrade that before any heat pump system could be installed.

There’s more than just that, though. As Frank Kummer, the article author noted, many Philadelphia houses, particularly the rowhomes, “still have boilers that use radiators and baseboard heat. Those likely would need ductless, mini-split heat pumps.” While it is possible to mount mini-split units on interior walls, doing so is more complicated, and more expensive than mounting them on exterior walls.

This is a program that is nothing more than welfare for the already well-to-do. The heat pump systems do have tax credits, but that doesn’t mean that homeowners can simply stroke a check for $15 grand, and be able to wait for their tax credits. While some rowhouse neighborhoods like Fishtown are gentrifying, and might have some better-off homeowners who would consider heat pumps as they remodel, it’s more difficult to see how the working-class people in Philly’s working-class neighborhoods could do so. If their gas furnaces have to be replaced, it’s still cheaper for them to replace with new gas furnaces than heat pumps, as Mr Kummer’s article tells us.

And so I go back to the beginning, and how electricity is our most vulnerable to the weather utility. If you live in a Philly rowhome, and the power goes out on a bitterly cold February day, whether you had a heat pump based system, or your old natural gas fired boiler for radiators, both would be out. But a low-end home generator from Lowe’s or Home Despot can provide enough 110-volt, 20-amp power to run your natural gas furnace, while you’d need a substantial generator, providing 220-volts to run your heat pump system.

I have no objection at all to people being able to choose what kind of heating system they want; I do find it objectionable that the government has its snotty nose in these decisions, and that the feds are providing what amounts to welfare for already prosperous people.

References

References
1 Data accessed on July 29, 2024, and may show differently in the future, as the referenced real estate site updates information as it is received.

The left are pro-choice on exactly one thing

Journalist James Ochoa of The Street has said that Ford is sending “mixed signals” about its “commitment” to plug in electric vehicles, but he’s got that wrong. Reality is that car buyers have sent signals that the left do not like concerning the silly things!


Ford execs send mixed signals about EV commitment

The Dearborn-based automaker’s moves are a grim reflection of the EV market

James Ochoa | Sunday, July 21, 2024 | 5:09 PM EDT

Despite CEO Jim Farley’s enthusiasm about electric vehicles, navigating the avenues of the EV marketplace has been a rocky road at best for Ford (F).

In its earnings report released in April, the Blue Oval reported that its electric car division, Model e, lost $1.3 billion in the first quarter of 2024. Meanwhile, the automaker’s commercial and fleet vehicle division, Ford Pro, made $7,300 per vehicle on the nearly 400,000 vehicles it sold.

Meanwhile, the electric Model e division lost $130,000 on each of the nearly 10,000 EVs it moved in the same period.

Think about that: Ford was losing twice the cost of its most expensive electric vehicle, the F-150 lightning, on each unit sold.

During the company’s earnings call, Farley expressed that much work had to be done to make its EVs positively impact the company’s bottom line.

“We’re being very consistent about our discipline on profitability,” Farley said. “We expect every one of our EVs to make money in the first 12 months, and that is a very disciplined process.”

But here comes the kicker:

Part of Ford’s “disciplined process” is outsizing the need to build more profitable vehicles. Unfortunately for the environment, those vehicles aren’t electric vehicles but rather massive, fuel-burning, heavy-duty pickup trucks.

In a recent announcement, Blue Oval said it’s investing $3 billion to boost the output of the Super Duty, the bigger, bulkier sibling of the popular F-150 pickup trucks. These trucks, equipped with up to a 7.3-liter V8 engine, are popular with tradespeople and laymen who want extra power for towing larger objects like boats.

The article continues to tell readers about the investments the company is making to produce more of the Super Duty, which is a version of the F-250 or F-350, not the F-150 — because Ford is having trouble keeping up with the demand for the trucks. And here’s the money line:

While Ford’s Model e division loses $130,000 on each EV, Ford makes an estimated $20,000 in profit on every Super Duty.

Translation: in a market in which the federal government is providing tax credits and incentives to buy plug-in electric vehicles, Ford still cannot sell enough of them to come close to breaking even, while the company not only makes money on its larger trucks, but is just barely, if that, keeping up with the demand. While there are obviously some people who want EVs, the majority of the new vehicle buying market simply don’t want them.

But, of course, the federal government, and some state governments, want to force-feed the American people on things they do not really want. President Biden put in place a mandate that all new vehicles sold in the United States must be zero-emission by 2035, but his term ends in January. The expected Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Emhoff[1]Just because she does not respect her husband enough to have taken his name, I will not show him similar disrespect. launched her own presidential campaign in 2019, and her stated positions were even more stringent than Mr Biden’s:

  • A bold target to exceed the Paris Agreement climate goals and achieve a clean economy by 2045;
  • Investing $10 trillion in public and private funding to meet the initial 10-year mobilization necessary to stave off the worst climate impacts;
  • Modernize our transportation, energy, and water infrastructure;
  • Accelerate the spread of electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines;
  • Make big investments in battery storage, climate-smart agriculture, advanced manufacturing, and the innovative technologies that will build our carbon-free future;
  • By 2030, we will run on 100 percent carbon-neutral electricity, all new buses, heavy-duty vehicles, and vehicle fleets will be zero-emission;

As we have previously reported, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Agency (SEPTA) bought 25 battery-electric buses from California manufacturer Proterra in 2016, but all have been parked since 2020 because they were pieces of feces had problems. In November of 2022, one of the mothballed Proterra buses spontaneously caught fire, which a SEPTA spokeswoman confirmed was traced to lithium ion battery units inside the bus.

  • All new buildings will be carbon-neutral; and
  • Transition our public lands from producing the fossil fuels that represent 24 percent of national emissions to carbon sinks.

In 2023, the United States was the world’s largest crude oil producer, as it had been for the previous five years, and has the world’s greatest proven recoverable oil reserves. In 2023, the US was by far the world’s largest natural gas producer, at 1,035,000,000,000 cubic feet, 76.4% more than #2 Russia’s 586.4 billion ft³, and over four times as much as third place Iran.

The propane fireplace that is our secondary heat source.

Mrs Emhoff would curtail our oil and natural gas production where she could, raising prices for consumers, and sending more of Americans’ hard-earned dollars to foreign countries to buy oil and natural gas, and, of course, cut the number of jobs in oil and natural gas production in the US.

That is all pie-in-the-sky, and four years of economic reality ought to temper her proposals, but it tells us that Mrs Emhoff doesn’t care about what the American people actually want, as measured by our own economic choices. We vote every couple of years for political candidates, but we vote every single day of our lives with our economic choices. Those people buying gasoline-powered vehicles are voting against the Democrats’ plans to require zero-emission cars and trucks, at least for themselves. Those people buying or remodeling with natural gas furnaces and ranges are voting against the liberals’ stated policies.

The United States has been blessed with tremendous natural resources, including huge oil and natural gas resources. The US also has the world’s largest coal reserves, 250.3 billion tons, 56.1% more than second place Russia’s 160.3 billion tons. Mrs Emhoff and the Democrats would squander that great natural wealth by leaving it untapped, costing the American people wealth and jobs, and sending more of our remaining wealth overseas to buy things we currently produce ourselves.

References

References
1 Just because she does not respect her husband enough to have taken his name, I will not show him similar disrespect.

Green virtue signaling Too bad that they don't know what they are talking about

Every so often I can see the virtue signaling of the environmentalists that just makes me laugh. Former Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) may have been totally inept at actually running the city, but he sure was great at getting a ‘sugary beverage tax’ passed, to fight obesity, don’t you know, that’s none of the city’s business. And even though he was fully in support of ‘my body, my choice’ when it came to women killing their yet-to-be-born children, he was adamant and aggressive in fighting the unions to get city employees who wanted to exercise bodily autonomy when it came to taking an experimental vaccine.

Then, about six years ago, in his effort to fight global warming climate change, he pushed a project to get solar power for electricity for city-owned buildings. Continue reading

There is a two word phrase to accurately describe the electric buses sold to transit agencies, and the first of those two words is “cluster”.

The Biden Administration and the global warming climate change activists want to force all new vehicles sold in the United States to be zero-emission come 2035, because they believe that our personal choices don’t matter, but even now they are pushing plug-in electrics, seemingly unconcerned with the possible drawbacks. From Fox Business:

Electric buses are sitting unused in cities across the US; here’s why

Cities coast-to-coast grappling with broken-down e-buses that cannot be fixed

Continue reading

If electric cars are the future, why are investors fleeing companies the build and run EV charging stations?

But, but, but, we’ve been told that plug-in electric vehicles are the wave of the future! From The Wall Street Journal:

Investors Sour on EV Charging Companies

EV charging companies have fallen from lofty valuations as concerns mount about their profitability

by Jennifer Hiller | Boxing Day, December 26, 2023 | 7:00 AM EST

The companies that install and operate electric-vehicle charging networks are in the middle of a building boom, but their share prices are sputtering. Continue reading

St Greta of Thunberg must be appalled! I am wryly amused

Former Democratic presidential nominees Al Gore and John Kerry are surely weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth at the news, but the sensible among us see this as great! From CNN:

The United States is producing more oil than any country in history

By Matt Egan | Updated 5:00 PM EST | Tuesday, December 19, 2023

As the world grapples with the existential crisis of climate change, environmental activists want President Joe Biden to phase out the oil industry, and Republicans argue he’s already doing that. Meanwhile, the surprising reality is the United States is pumping oil at a blistering pace and is on track to produce more oil than any country has in history.

“The existential crisis of climate change”? So many reporters keep using that word; I do not think it means what they think it means. We may have some issues with which to deal with global warming climate change, but we’re not all going to die.

Remember: human beings are the most adaptable creatures on earth, and we live everywhere, from arctic wastelands to steaming jungles to bone dry deserts, and we have done so even prior to our modern, industrialized society.

The United States is set to produce a global record of 13.3 million barrels per day of crude and condensate during the fourth quarter of this year, according to a report published Tuesday by S&P Global Commodity Insights.

Last month, weekly US oil production hit 13.2 million barrels per day, according to the US Energy Information Administration. That’s just above the Donald Trump-era record of 13.1 million set in early 2020 just before the Covid-19 crisis sent output and prices crashing.

As the world’s largest oil producer, that means more American dollars stay in the United States rather than going to Saudi Arabia or Venezuela, and some money from foreign countries comes to the United States. This enriches American companies and American workers, and that ought to be seen as a good thing for the American people.

The US is exporting roughly the same amounts of crude oil, refined fuels and liquid natural gas as Saudi Arabia and Russia. With the Saudi and Russian collusion, on which we have previously reported, to reduce OPEC’s production to raise prices, American production has helped keep those prices down.

“It’s a reminder that the US is endowed with enormous oil reserves. Our industry should never be underestimated,” said Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group.

Record-shattering US production is helping to offset aggressive supply cuts meant to support high prices by OPEC+, mainly Saudi Arabia and Russia. Other non-OPEC oil producers including Canada and Brazil are also pumping more oil than ever before. (Brazil is set to join OPEC+ next year.)

Think about what this means. Russia’s economy is dependent upon oil and natural gas exports, and Vladimir Putin wanted to use western Europe’s dependence upon Russia oil and, especially, natural gas as a weapon against NATO countries which are supporting Ukraine with money and military equipment. Without Russian natural gas, a lot of western Europe countries, much of which are at latitudes higher than our lower 48-state border with Canada, the Europeans would have gotten awfully cold during the past two winters, but American production has prevented Russia from being able to effectively utilize their energy weapon.

The climate activists want us to cease oil production, thinking that that will somehow save the world, and perhaps we can eventually develop energy systems which can truly replace oil for energy production, but, right now, that day has not come. And the United States, with its oil, natural gas, and seriously underused coal reserves, has natural resources which can make Americans in general wealthier. The activists just don’t get it: doing what they want would make Americans poorer.

Then again, if liberals actually understood economics, they wouldn’t be liberals anymore.

Has your income increased 58.39% since November of 2020? Gasoline prices have increased that much!

With Thanksgiving just a week away, many people have their minds on travel plans, to visit extended family a long way away. Fortunately for us, Thanksgiving travel means a whopping 18 miles, to my sister’s house.

Screen capture by D R Pico, November 16, 2023.

Stephanie Abrams of The Weather Channel gave us an interesting map of fuel prices across the fruited plain, and it shows just what you’d expect: in states where the government wants a deeper bite into your wallet, it’s going to cost you more to visit the relatives!

Here in the Bluegrass State, the average price as shown by the American Automobile Association is $3.037 per gallon, though the station closest to me has $2.959 per gallon for regular posted. I pay close attention to Pennsylvania, where we used to live, and the average price for regular is currently $3.607 per gallon, 57¢ higher than in Kentucky.

Kentucky is right in the middle when it comes to state taxes on gasoline, 26th in the nation at 30.10¢ per gallon, while Pennsylvania is third, charging 62.20¢ per gallon. As you’d obviously guess, the Pyrite State, California, tops the list, taxing its people.

Interestingly, Illinois, which has the second highest tax rate on fuel, at 66.5¢ per gallon, shares a birder with Missouri, with the second lowest, 17.47¢. Continue reading

Did $24 million of SEPTA’s money go up in smoke?

I am wryly amused. 🙂

In the left’s rush to phase out reliable gasoline-ort-diesel-powered vehicles, sometimes the amusing happens. The City of Brotherly Love, in its desire to go green, bought 25 battery-electric buses from California manufacturer Proterra in 2016.

It didn’t turn out well:

A Proterra electric bus battery caught fire in a South Philly SEPTA depot

There have been several battery-related fires in electric buses and cars.

by Ryan W. Briggs and Thomas Fitzgerald | November 11, 2022 | 12:08 PM EST

A battery power pack in a sidelined electric bus ignited Wednesday at SEPTA’s Southern Bus Depot, occupying city fire crews for hours and delivering another possible setback to efforts to build a low-emission fleet in Philadelphia.

No injuries were reported.

The transit agency bought 25 battery-electric buses from California manufacturer Proterra in 2016, but all have been parked at the depot since 2020 after discovery of cracks in bus frames and performance problems.

That third quoted paragraph is the money line: all 25 Proterra have been parked since 2020, because they were pieces of feces had problems. A SEPTA spokeswoman confirmed that the fire’s origin was traced to lithium ion battery units inside the bus.

Further down: Continue reading

Our American Revolution began around Boston; now Bostonians are saddled with an authoritarian government that they chose for themselves! Somehow, I lack sympathy for Bostonians, who should have known better.

We have previously reported, several times, on how wealthy New Englanders, people with the money to do what they want, choose to heat their homes and cook their food, and just enjoy the good life, even though the climate activists don’t want people to have that choice. Today’s left appear to be pro-choice on exactly one thing.

Well, it’s one thing when the activists don’t believe that people should have the choices most wish to take, but something else entirely when someone with governing power thinks that way.

‘Barrier To Entry’: Dem Mayor Bans Fossil Fuel Use In New City Buildings, Eyes Residential Buildings Next

Story by Nick Pope • Tuesday, August 1, 2023 • 7:13 PM

Democratic Boston Mayor Michelle Wu signed an executive order Monday banning new construction or renovations of municipal buildings that would use fossil fuels, according to the Boston Herald.

Monday’s executive order is part of Wu’s broader efforts to implement a similar ban on fossil fuel use in new residential buildings, according to the Boston Herald. Wu stated that “Boston will continue using every possible tool” to counter climate change, according to a Monday press release, but a de facto ban on fossil fuel use in new residential developments could impose higher costs, Greg Vasil, CEO of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The potential ban on fossil fuel hookups in the city’s new residential buildings “is going to be a real barrier to entry” for developers “to build what they want to build in Boston” if enacted, Vasil told the DCNF. “It would definitely drive up costs,” Vasil continued, adding that “there’s a desire to satisfy campaign promises without understanding the economic situation.”

And that’s the main point, “a desire to satisfy campaign promises without understanding the economic situation.” Michelle Pewarski[1]Mrs Pewarski, like so many leftist women, does not respect her husband enough to have taken his name, but we at The First Street Journal do not show the same disrespect, and always refer to married … Continue reading is an activist, who understands what she wants to do, but hasn’t the first clue about reality.

Wu won the mayor’s election in November 2021, in part by running on a promise to deliver Boston a “green new deal.” Her administration intends to apply for a Massachusetts state program that will permit ten communities in the state to prohibit gas hookups in new buildings, according to the Boston Herald.

In April, Boston’s city council approved an ordinance which requires new residential buildings in the city to feature electrical wiring that will allow for future conversion to electricity and to connect to solar power, according to the Boston Herald. Wu’s office estimates that around 70% of the city’s overall emissions are attributable to buildings, according to the Monday press release announcing the signing of the executive order.

The latter paragraph notes a policy that makes some sense. It is far less expensive to add the additional wiring to allow a future owner to convert from gas heat, ranges, and water heaters to electric appliances during the construction phase, than to have to add the wiring later during a remodel. When we had a propane — there is no natural gas service this far out in the countryside — water heater installed to replace the on-its-last-legs electric one in 2018, I left the 10-2 wiring for the old water heater in place, though I did disconnect it from the circuit breaker panel. I did remove the wiring for the old electric range, but I did that because it was poorly installed, not because I objected to it being there.

But Mayor Pewarski, like so many other of the activists, has no idea what she is doing. The only region of the country in which electricity is the predominant method of heating homes is the southeast, for two reasons:

  1. The propane fireplace that is our secondary heat source.

    With many rural residents living outside of areas served by natural gas, it is far easier and less expensive to get electricity to a house than it is natural gas.

  2. The southeast has generally milder winters, in which electric heat pumps have a better chance of keeping up with heating demand.

In my travels around eastern Kentucky, especially since we added propane to our formerly all-electric home, I notice other homes which have propane tanks, and there are a lot of them. I do not know how many of those houses primarily heat their homes using propane, or how many are like us, using a propane appliance, in our case a propane fireplace, as supplemental heat for really cold days, or backup heat for those times when the power fails.

A cheery fire in our wood stove in Jim Thorpe.

We learned our lesson the hard way! On Christmas Day of 2002, a heavy, wet snow at our house in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, knocked out electric service, and our fuel-oil powered steam boiler, which supplied the radiators, would not work without electricity. Power was restored in approximately 30 hours, but on that cold, snowy day, we couldn’t cook, couldn’t bathe, and it got down to 50º F inside our 1890 Victorian home. We later added a nice wood stove, which did not require electricity to operate, but it sure would have been nice to have had that before we lost sparktricity!

It was early Monday morning, March 12, 2018, when we received five inches of heavy, wet snow, as well as ice, at our farm in Estill County, Kentucky, and we lost electricity, in our all-electric home, sometime before 4:30 AM. No, I’m not relying on memory; I’m actually kind of obsessive about recording things in my At-A-Glance Daily Diary, and I have a whole shelf of them, dating back to 1986, missing only 2001’s, which was lost somehow.

Fortunately, it was 42º F and sunny outside by afternoon, which helped some, but it still got down to 52º F inside the house. My wife, having to work the following day, drove to Lexington to stay at our daughter’s apartment, so she could do something really radical like take a shower in the morning. There was just enough sort-of warm water in the water heater for me to take a quick shower on Tuesday morning. While my wife could leave, I had to stay at home to care for the critters.

Our remodeled kitchen, including the propane range! All of the work except the red quartz countertops was done by my family and me. Click to enlarge.

To make a long story short, we finally got sparktricity back at 4:54 PM on Thursday, March 15th. It had gotten as cool as 37º F inside the house, though warmer in my bedroom, which I heated with sunshine through the window and my own body heat. The high for that day was 58º F, so that helped some. I wonder how bad things would have gotten if we had lost power for 4½ days in mid-January.

We had planned on remodeling all along, because our house was a fixer-upper when we bought it, and Mrs Pico had stated, early on, that she wanted a gas range, but we hadn’t begun the remodel quite yet. That end-of-winter power loss was enough to persuade us that we needed supplemental heat here as well.

We are not wealthy, nor even well-to-do, but at least we are not as poor as many people in eastern Kentucky. Had someone like Mayor Pewarski been in governing authority around here, we would not have had the choice of installing propane utilities to keep us warm in the winter when the temperature gets too low for the heat pump to keep up, or the power knocked out, which can happen for days at a time in rural areas like ours.

The liberals in Boston gave Mrs Pewarski 64% of their votes, and she had made no secret of her support for the cockamamie ‘green new deal,’ so it’s difficult to argue against the notion that they have gotten exactly what they deserve. Perhaps they didn’t know the specifics, didn’t understand that she would use government power to ban future natural gas hookups, but anyone who looks has to know that today’s left are all about force, are all about trying to impose their choices on other people. That this has happened in Boston, the cradle of our liberty, and the area in which our American Revolution began, is just an added insult to the American dream.

References

References
1 Mrs Pewarski, like so many leftist women, does not respect her husband enough to have taken his name, but we at The First Street Journal do not show the same disrespect, and always refer to married women by their proper names.