Redstate

idea from congress?

the vestiges of our agricultural roots that still hang around. Our school district just got around a couple years ago to moving high school start times up from 7:30 am to 8:45 am--despite all the research saying that adolescents learn better later in the day, kids were still trudging to class half-asleep because that's when the day started when they were still tilling the fields.

Daylight Savings Time was not invented to "benefit farmers." Daylight Savings, by moving an hour from the morning to the evening saves energy and makes the roads safer. Permanent Daylight Savings will conserve electricy and reduce car accidents. Drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge does not accomplish either of those.

Multi-faceted solutions (more production, better conservation) are usually superior to single track efforts.

it's just nicer to have it lighter later. And besides, who likes getting out of work in the dark at 5pm?

Seriously, though, more energy is used during the early evening dark hours than late morning dark hours.

When you said this:

There are twenty-four hours in a day. Congress could, constitutionally, decree that there are going to be forty-eight thirty minute hours in a day, but that would no more affect the amount of sunshine the earth receives on a given day than it would improve the lives of Americans.

I immediately thought of the kerfuffle over the "Acts of Succession" that resulted in the beheading of St. Sir Thomas More, as related brilliantly in Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons."

Richard Rich's perjury: "He said, 'Parliament hath not the competence.' Or words to that effect."

Then the pity-ful follow up when More confronts Rich on his perjury (from memory):

"Wales? Richard, it profits a man nothing to lose his soul and gain the whole world, but for Wales?..."

devastating. and brilliant, even if only historic fiction.

The theoretical conservation in expanded daylight savings time derives from extending the more active hours of the day -- when folks are up and about -- during daylight. People are up, you need fewer lights, OK.

But what about all the other effects? All the airlines are now out of sync with international schedules for the expanded period. Routes and landing rights are affected. What are the economic costs there?

How about the costs of commerce with Canada, our biggest trading partner? Canadian provinces are saying they might have to follow suit.

And are the protests of even small constituencies, the much-beleagured drive-in theater business, just to be ignored because their time is past, anyway?

The costs of insurance associated with the eight to 10 kids who will be knocked off the side of the road as they wait for the schoolbus in the dark? (I don't know what the actual number is, but worried parents are a major, vocal constituency opposed to this kind of time stretching.)

Congress acknowledged the merits of the counterarguments by extending daylight savings time, just not as long as the original Markey language intended. But disruption is disruption.

As a conservative, I believe in the value of consistency, tradition, of refusing to markey around.

Did I say markey? I meant monkey, monkey around.