Back to Basics

It’s been a rough few weeks for the “eco-progressive” fringe.

Static jet streams induced near-record high temperatures in parts of the United States and Russia, but extreme cold pummeled Seattle, England and much of the Southern Hemisphere. Perhaps Al Gore, Michael Mann and Rajendra Pachauri can turn this hodgepodge into “catastrophic climate change,” but most folks understand it as Mother Nature and weather.

Polls and news accounts find more Americans, Europeans and other people becoming weary and skeptical of “manmade global warming disaster” claims, convinced that natural forces are the primary cause of recurrent climate change, and unwilling to accept soaring energy prices and reduced living standards in the name of stabilizing Earth’s unpredictable climate.

Few Americans place any value on EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s meaningless statement – that “climate change is happening and humans are contributing to it” – to justify the draconian regimes the agency is trying to impose. The issue is whether our emissions of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide is causing catastrophic climate change, and there is no credible evidence of that.

The House-passed energy and climate bill remains moribund in the Senate. EPA is trying to regulate carbon dioxide in the absence of congressional action – based on its assertion that automotive, power plant and factory CO2 emissions “endanger human health and welfare.” However, Texas refuses to knuckle under, other states may likewise balk, and the next Congress could overturn the “endangerment” finding and bar EPA from rewriting the Clean Air Act and implementing its job-killing rules.

“Avatar” director James Cameron double-dared global warming disaster skeptics to debate him – then morphed into a chicken and cackled off when they accepted his increasingly ludicrous debate terms, calling his critics “swine” as he headed for the hills.

Having read too many Gore, Pachauri, Quinn and other Deep Ecology treatises, LunaBomber James Lee held Discovery Channel employees hostage and denounced the TV station for its support of “parasitic human infants,” before being shot by police. His website and actions underscore how demented some Earth Liberation and global warming fanatics have become.

As their economies have deteriorated, Germany, Italy, Spain and other countries have pulled the plug on unsustainable wind and solar subsidies, eliminating thousands of “green” jobs and putting hundreds of “clean energy” companies on the verge of bankruptcy.

Glen Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally on the National Mall drew 300,000 people. Meanwhile, “CarnivOil” events in Wisconsin drew more yawns than people, as desperate Big Environment groups struggled to regain their momentum, by ranting about global warming, the Gulf oil spill, and “evil” oil companies.

Americans increasingly understand that even sending US carbon dioxide emissions back to 1870 levels, as congressional climate bills would do, will not reduce global atmospheric CO2 levels, because emissions from China, India and other nations will rapidly offset our painful reductions. Those countries have made it clear that they will not sacrifice improved living standards for assertions that we can stabilize global temperatures by keeping atmospheric CO2 levels below 0.035-0.045% (350-450 ppm).

I know that they only think of this as the second stimulus bill. After all the recently signed $26 billion spending bill was just a “jobs” bill and this stimulus really is about something different than jobs, right? OK, I am just confused. This is also a jobs bill, but the previous jobs bill was not a stimulus bill.

The Obama administration is mulling a raft of emergency fixes to stimulate the economy before the midterms, including an extension of the research and development tax credit and new infrastructure spending, according to several people familiar with the situation.

Administration officials have been huddling almost continuously during the past week, brainstorming for ideas that would boost employment without hiking the massive federal deficit – with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner rushing to the West Wing for further consultations late Thursday.

The White House press office on Thursday refused to say how much a financial package might be, other than to say it won’t be a “second stimulus.” But the administration will have a tough time selling nearly any package to terrified, Obama-phobic Hill Democrats who increasingly blame the president – and his ambitious, expensive legislative agenda – for their dismal prospects this November.

The meetings, which had Obama huddling with his economic advisers twice in the last seven days, have yielded no specific proposals. But he’s given the team a priority: find ways to pay for as many of the ideas, mostly tax breaks, as possible without a deficit increase, an administration official told POLITICO.

The R-and-D tax cut, which Congressional Democrats have already considered would, for example, be paid for by closing overseas corporate loopholes.

But party leaders were dubious that even a modest, targeted spending bill could pass muster at the height of an anti-tax, anti-deficit, Tea Party-fueled Republican resurgence. . . . .

Finally, California shows some sense. Lawmakers trashed an onerous, ill-timed, empty-gesture plastic bag ban pushed by radical greens this week:

California lawmakers have rejected a bill seeking to ban plastic shopping bags after a contentious debate over whether the state was going too far in trying to regulate personal choice.

The Democratic bill, which failed late Tuesday, would have been the first statewide ban, although a few California cities already prohibit their use.

…The bill, AB1998, called for the ban to take effect in supermarkets and large retail stores in 2012. It would have applied to smaller stores in 2013.

Republicans and some Democrats opposed it, saying it would add an extra burden on consumers and businesses at a time when many already are struggling financially.

…The Senate took final action at the very end of the legislative session, reflecting how difficult it had been to muster support. The bill received just 14 votes in the Senate, seven short of the majority it needed.

The inconvenient truth is that the eco-propaganda about plastic bag perils is so much hype. Don’t take it from me. Take it from environmental scientists themselves:

“The Government is irresponsible to jump on a bandwagon that has no base in scientific evidence,” said Lord Taverne, the chairman of Sense about Science. “This is one of many examples where you get bad science leading to bad decisions which are counter-productive. Attacking plastic bags makes people feel good but it doesn’t achieve anything.”

Campaigners say that plastic bags pollute coastlines and waterways, killing or injuring birds and livestock on land and, in the oceans, destroying vast numbers of seabirds, seals, turtles and whales. However, the Times has established that there is no scientific evidence to show that the bags pose any direct threat to marine mammals.

They “don’t figure” in the majority of cases where animals die from marine debris, said David Laist, the author of a seminal 1997 study on the subject. Most deaths were caused when creatures became caught up in waste produce. “Plastic bags don’t figure in entanglement,” he said. “The main culprits are fishing gear, ropes, lines and strapping bands. Most mammals are too big to get caught up in a plastic bag.”

He added: “The impact of bags on whales, dolphins, porpoises and seals ranges from nil for most species to very minor for perhaps a few species.For birds, plastic bags are not a problem either.”

The central claim of campaigners is that the bags kill more than 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds every year. However, this figure is based on a misinterpretation of a 1987 Canadian study in Newfoundland, which found that, between 1981 and 1984, more than 100,000 marine mammals, including birds, were killed by discarded nets. The Canadian study did not mention plastic bags.

Fifteen years later in 2002, when the Australian government commissioned a report into the effects of plastic bags, its authors misquoted the Newfoundland study, mistakenly attributing the deaths to “plastic bags.”

The figure was latched on to by conservationists as proof that the bags were killers. For four years the “typo” remained uncorrected.

In Colonial America it was common for British soldiers, tax collectors and other representatives of the Crown to obtain a writ of assistance giving them the authority to enter any home, business or ship at any time of the day or night in search of contraband goods or to interrogate the residents and owners over payment of taxes or for most any other reason.

Writs of assistance were very vague search warrants and it was a simple procedure to obtain them. They could be had for any reason or no reason from the Colonial governor or from judges — all of whom held their positions at the whim of the King of England.

In 1761 James Otis Jr., the Advocate General of Massachusetts — whose job it was to defend the issuance of the writs in court — resigned his position and took the side of 63 Boston merchants in a court battle against the writs. He represented the merchants for free, and though he lost the case in a court stacked against him, he earned the title of patriot.

It was his five-hour speech in court that served “as the spark in which originated the American Revolution,” according to John Adams, who was sitting in the courtroom at the time.

“The child of independence was then and there born, every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance,” Adams said.

The issue was such an important one to the Colonists that it was mentioned as one of the grievances in the Declaration of Independence: “He (the king)… sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

Since it was so important an issue to the Founding Fathers it’s not surprising that an Amendment was included in the Constitution that forbids the government from arbitrarily searching people, homes and businesses.

It was the Colonists’ experience with unreasonable searches and seizures and Otis’ speech that planted the seeds that grew into the 4th Amendment which reads:

“The right of the people to be secure in the persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The 4th Amendment has been under assault before in our nation’s history. And that has been chronicled in other articles on this site. But now that right, guaranteed by our Constitution, is as dead as a hammer.

The most recent major assault on the 4th Amendment came in the wake of 9/11 when President George W. Bush proposed and Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act, which was most unpatriotic.

In the Senate the act passed 98 to one. Democrat Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) was the lone dissenter. Democrat Mary Landrieu (D-La.) did not vote.

In the House it passed 357-66 with nine not voting. Sixty-five of the dissenters were Democrats. Ron Paul (R-Texas) was the lone Republican to oppose the bill.

Sensing Senators don’t have the stomach to try and pass a stand-alone bill in broad daylight that would give the President the power to shut down the Internet in a national emergency, the Senate is considering attaching the Internet Kill Switch bill as a rider to other legislation that would have bi-partisan support.

“It’s hard to get a measure like cybersecurity legislation passed on its own,” Senator Thomas Carper (D-Del.) told GovInfoSecurity.com. Carper is chairman of the Senate subcommittee with cybersecurity oversight.

Under instructions from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Senators Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) are working to combine their separate bills into one that can be attached to another piece of legislation, such as the Defense Authorization Act.

While proponents say an Internet Kill Switch is needed to protect the nation’s power, water and banking grids, what it really is is a way to control the flow of information. Experts have said that the nation’s power and water grids are not connected directly to the Internet.

Lieberman let slip his real thoughts on the Internet Kill Switch in an interview with CNN’s Candy Crowley when he said, “Right now China — the government — can disconnect parts of its Internet in a case of war. We need to have the ability to do that, too.”

For more on Lieberman’s interview, go here.

And the idiot Rockefeller is no friend of the Internet either. He has said he wished the Internet had never been invented and we were back to communicating with pencil and paper.

China and other totalitarian regimes readily use their power over the Internet to deny their citizens the free flow of information. And that’s what in store for the United States if this bill comes to fruition.

The President — Democrat or Republican — can now use almost any excuse to declare a state of emergency and that would give him the excuse to shut down any and all parts of the Internet. The target of the shutdown could be sites that express dissenting views or entire sections of the country the President — or his puppet master — is displeased with.

The Senate will soon be back in Washington, D.C., for a four-week session before adjourning until the November elections. This is the window that provides the most danger to our freedom.

Hat tip: PrisonPlanet.com

Since his election, New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie has been remarkably successful in dealing with the Democrat controlled state legislature and has rocketed to national fame for simply being the real deal when it comes to conservative politics and policies.

That is, until he signed a bill on August 19 that one columnist described as touting “the idea of raising your electric rates to place windmills in the ocean off New Jersey.” In this case the windmill would be 75 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty! None of the residents of Union Beach want a windmill no matter how far out in the Atlantic it’s built.

So-called alternative or renewable energy is always far more expensive than the kind generated by nuclear or coal-fired plants.

It is always more unreliable insofar as the wind does not blow all the time, thus requiring a traditional plant to be online to back up those ugly insults to the natural beauty of land and sea when they fail to feed the grid.

Few people know that, even without wind, the windmills must be kept turning, using electricity to avoid mechanical failures.

Gov. Christie signed a bill that would put the windmill so far out at sea it could not be seen from the land, but that ignores the fact that it will cost taxpayers $7 million to construct it, half of which will be paid by a federal grant, and the result will be an increase in consumer rates. Why would any sensible person want to spend that kind of money on a single windmill?

Part of the answer is something called the Renewable Electricity Standards (RES) that the U.S. Senate is contemplating. As Dr. S. Fred Singer noted in an August American Thinker.com commentary, “It would force electric utilities to generate a large and increasing percentage of their power from wind and solar—rising to 15% by 2021.” In other words, the U.S. Senate is about to select winners and losers in the energy marketplace by requiring utilities to use expensive and inefficient wind and solar power.

If wind and solar were so wonderful, why can’t either of these energy producers even exist without a federal mandate?

Even worse, these two bogus forms of energy exist on the basis of a complete lie; that they reduce carbon dioxide emissions and thus will save the planet from global warming. Only there never was a threat of global warming and the planet has been in a natural cooling cycle for a decade!

The whole wind and solar business is a gigantic rip-off and will inevitably cause consumer rates to rise for all the reasons cited above. Just as Obamacare is already causing insurance rates to skyrocket, so will the implementation of Renewable Electricity Standards.

In France, Germany and Italy they are already in the process of backing away from subsidizing this idiotic form of energy production.

Every so often, one of my readers who has apparently dipped once too often into the cooking sherry wonders why I don’t run for Congress. The short answer is that I don’t want to ever again wear a necktie. I also don’t wish to spend my life going hat-in-hand begging for campaign contributions. Worse yet, what if I actually won the election and then had to listen to Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank mouth off endlessly? Between her nursery school delivery and his lisping, I’m sure I’d soon be popping Excedrin like peanuts.

Instead, I prefer staying home and telling everybody in Washington how to do their jobs better. So, for openers, I would make it a law that every bill would contain only a single item. No more piling on. No more legislation that contains, say, funding for the military with tax dollars for ACORN or an unnecessary bridge or airport named after some partisan hack. As things stand now, every appropriations bill comes loaded with a ton of political pork. When called on it, the weasels in both parties get to say, “Well, I had to support the troops, didn’t I?”

Conservatives who automatically deny that the Arizona immigration law is racially-based are lying. Of course it is, in just the same way that a border wall would be. How can it not be when the millions of people who have snuck into the U.S. are all Hispanics? It makes as much sense to deny that the war on terrorism is directed at Islamics. The problem is that those who favor open borders accuse the rest of us of being racists. That’s the big lie they love to promote. Americans, after all, have no trouble living and working with Hispanics who are here legally.

If the illegals pouring in were Swedes, Germans or Poles, our opposition, which is based on principles and the law, would be the same. The difference is that the very same hypocrites who favor open borders today are the ones who would change their tune overnight if the aliens weren’t Hispanic. The ugly, but unvarnished, truth is that they’re the racists.

Of course the number one racist in America is the fellow who spent 20 years soaking up Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s vicious attacks on white Americans. It’s probably not a coincidence that Barack Obama is also the biggest liar who’s ever sat in the Oval Office. In fact, if his nose grew like Pinocchio’s every time he told a fib, they probably would have had to leave Joy Behar and Sherri Shepherd in the wings in order to make room for the presidential shnoz on “The View.”

The latest proof that in looking for a role model, Obama snubbed George Washington and patterned himself, instead, on a used car salesman was his announcement that he was “surprised, disappointed and angry” when Scotland released Lockerbie bomber Abdel al-Magrahi. It seems that Richard LeBaron, Obama’s deputy head of the U.S. embassy in London let Scotland know a week ahead of the event that the U.S.

I spotlighted the $26 billion BigGovJobs’ union payoff bill that President Obama signed into law last week — a payoff that was achieved through elaborate money-shuffling, including taking $12 billion from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Now comes word via The Hill that the Dems are going to double-dip into the food stamp program again — this time to pay for the massive expansion of the Child Nutrition Bill pushed by First Lady Michelle Obama.

The House will soon consider an $8 billion child nutrition bill that’s at the center of the first lady’s “Let’s Move” initiative. Before leaving for the summer recess, the Senate passed a smaller version of the legislation that is paid for by trimming the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps.

The proposed cuts would come on top of a 13.6 percent food stamp reduction in the $26 billion Medicaid and education state funding bill that President Obama signed this week.

Food stamps have made multiple appearances on the fiscal chopping block because Democrats have few other places to turn to offset the cost of legislation.

Party leaders raided the budget to find off-setting tax increases and spending cuts to pay for their top legislative priorities, including the roughly $900 billion healthcare law. Congressional pay-as-you-go rules require lawmakers to offset all non-emergency spending.

Democrats have turned to the food stamp program because funding increases enacted in the stimulus package last year were already scheduled to phase out over time. The changes proposed in the state aid and nutrition bills would simply cut off that increase early, in March 2014. Because the cuts would not take effect for more than three years, Democratic leaders have voiced the hope that they will be able to stop them in future legislation.

The bill previously passed by the House is HR 5044 and it includes such goodies as $5 million for a “Food Service Management Institute” and an open-ended “green cafeterias pilot program.”

I’ve reported many times on the SEIU agenda behind Mrs. Obama’s anti-childhood obesity crusade. It’s spotlighted in the paperback edition of Culture of Corruption for handy reference, and I’m reprinting my February 2010 column on the subject in full below.

Remember: Big Government programs “for the children” are never about the children.

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SEIU fatcats behind First Lady’s anti-obesity campaign
By Michelle Malkin • February 3, 2010 10:04 AM
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

Behind every seemingly good deed in the Obama White House, there’s a deep-pocketed, left-wing special interest. Take First Lady Michelle Obama’s crusade against childhood obesity. Who really benefits from the ostensible push for improved nutrition in the schools? Think purple – as in the purple-shirted army of the Service Employees International Union. Big Labor bigwigs don’t care about slimming your kids’ waistlines. They care about beefing up their membership rolls and fattening their coffers.

Mrs. Obama earned a State of the Union Address shout-out from her hubby for taking on the weighty public policy issue of students’ physical fitness.

The border with Mexico has 1,969 miles. The Obama administration is acting tough on illegal immigration by signing a bill that would increase the number of border patrol agents and add two unmanned drones.

“But the one thing they are not willing to do is what has been proven to work: a strong physical presence at the border and diligent enforcement of existing law,” Sessions said. “We know how to solve the problem; what we don’t know is why President Obama remains unwilling to do so.” . . .

The bill includes money for 1,500 new border personnel, a pair of unmanned drones and military-style bases along the border. It would be paid for mostly by hiking fees on foreign companies that use U.S. visa programs to import lower-cost labor from countries like India. Firms with more than 50 employees and more than 50 percent of their employees on H-1B work visas would be affected. . . .

Ironically, just last fall the Obama administration cut the number of border agents.

Border Patrol Director of Media Relations Lloyd Easterling confirmed this week . . . that his agency is planning for a net decrease of 384 agents on the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal 2010, which begins on October 1. . . .

USA Today has this from February, 2010:

The Obama administration is proposing to scale back some border security programs set up after the 9/11 attacks . . .

• The Border Patrol, which doubled to 20,000 agents during the Bush administration, would lose 180 agents through attrition. Border staffing would stay the same.

• A “virtual” fence of pole cameras and sensors aimed at stopping illegal immigrants, drug smugglers and terrorists on the U.S.-Mexican border, faces a $225 million cut from $800 million last year. That would delay implementation while a review of the fence, plagued by technical problems, is done.

• Five of the Coast Guard’s 13 elite Maritime Security and Safety Teams (MSST), created since 2001 to protect waterfront cities, would be eliminated. Obama is proposing cuts in New York City, San Francisco, Anchorage and King’s Bay, Ga.

• The existing 643 miles of concrete-and-steel border fence would be maintained but no new barriers would be built. . . .

The liberal PolitiFact has this:

Spending under the budget heading “border security, fencing, infrastructure and technology” has gone down — from $1.2 billion in 2007 to $800 million this fiscal year. Obama’s proposed 2011 budget calls for trimming the fence budget again, to $574 million. . . .

The other major piece of the fencing budget is the so-called “virtual border fence” championed by Bush. Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security announced it was freezing funding for the “virtual border fence” along the U.S. Mexican border. The virtual fence — which includes cameras, radar and ground sensors to detect illegal border crossings — has been plagued by cost overruns, missed deadlines and technical bugs, such as the radar motion detector being unable to distinguish between humans and animals crossing the border.