Domestic Policy: February 2009 Archives

A few days ago I heralded and praised the new GOP aggression in seizing items off the radical Donk shopping list - like the reimposition of the so-called "Fairness Doctrine" - and pre-empting the expected Obamedia spin on them by defining them truthfully and designing counter-legislation to at least slow down the runaway neoBolshevik juggarnaut.  Senator Jim DeMint's attaching the Broadcaster Freedom Act to a plumb Dem wish list item as unconstitutionally giving the District of Columbia full congressional representation was an act of legislative brilliance not seen on our side of the aisle in far too long a time and figured to make the majority have to choose whether to pander to their strongest voting base or muzzle Rush Limbaugh and his talk radio progeny.

The center-right effort to head of another "Fairness Doctrine" at the pass has burgeoned rapidly of late (via Newsmax Insider).

Moves are afoot to head off any Democratic efforts to reinstate the so-called Fairness Doctrine and stifle conservative talk radio.

A group of radio insiders has formed the Free Radio Coalition to fight the reinstatement, Radio America President James Roberts said on Tuesday.

Radio America talk show host and former San Diego Mayor Roger Hedgecock will chair the coalition.

“The reinstatement of the misnamed Fairness Doctrine would constitute a massive assault on our cherished First Amendment rights and should be of concern to all Americans, regardless of their political or religious persuasion,” Hedgecock said.

Group members want to hold a conference of talk show hosts and religious broadcasters in Washington to plan strategy, the Washington Times reported.

They also plan to prepare expert testimony in case the Federal Communications Commission or congressional committees hold hearings on the Doctrine.

However, the DeMint (and Mike Pence on the House side) strategy's success turned out to be so sudden and comprehensive that all the FRC's preparation may have left them all dressed up with no place to go:

The Senate on Thursday overwhelmingly approved an amendment banning reinstatement of the so-called "Fairness Doctrine" that would threaten conservative talk radio.

Republican Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina attached the amendment, called the Broadcaster Freedom Act, to a bill giving the District of Columbia a voting representative in the House. It passed by a wide margin of 87-to-11.

All right!  Now the FCC can't reimpose the Fairness Doctrine!  At the very least, congressional Democrats will have to do it themselves (probably by trying to slip it into one of their assembly line of gargantuan, national bankruptcy, economic implosion-inducing appropriations bills) rather than in the bureaucratic shadows.  Hooray!

Well, not quite yet.  The BFA would still have to make it into the conference version of the D.C. "Addaseattome" bill, and Red Barry would still have to sign it.

And that, as they say, is the rub:

But it's not clear if the amendment will survive as Congress debates the voting rights bill.

Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois also won approval for an alternate amendment ordering the Federal Communications Commission to encourage radio ownership "diversity." It passed by a vote of 57-41.

A DeMint aide said Durbin's measure will "impose the Fairness Doctrine through the back door by trying to break up radio ownership,” Fox News reported.

The First Amendment's tatters, IOW, are not out of the woods yet.  So keep stockpiling your powder, FRC, and keep it dry.  DeMint & Pence still need all the backup they can get. 

There's nothing like the combination of fighting spirit, political stamina, and legislative pro-activity on an issue that is an affront to the very ideal of democracy:

Republicans moved aggressively on Wednesday to seize the initiative in the upcoming fight over union-friendly “card check” legislation, simultaneously introducing bills in both the House and Senate that would protect workers’ rights to vote on union representation in private.

“We think it’s an issue where the American people are completely on our side,” Republican Study Committee spokesman Brendan Buck tells Newsmax. “So we want to be sure we’re out there letting them know that [card check] would strip away their rights in the workplace.”

Card check, euphemistically called the Employee Free Choice Act, is a Democratic proposal that would have workers sign cards indicating whether they want a union. The cards would be public documents, thereby eliminating the current system by which workers vote confidentially.

Public figures ranging from former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern to former Bush Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao have slammed card check as undemocratic and dangerous.

Once workers’ votes on unionization become public, they warn, employees could be exposed to intimidation by union toughs.

“The secret ballot is a pillar of American democracy,” Representative Tom Price, R-GA, said Wednesday. Price, the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, said Democrats want card check to “advance a political agenda.”

Union members vote disproportionately Democratic. Card check is highly coveted by organized labor because it is expected to swell the ranks of unions.

The Republican bill, called the Secret Ballot Protection Act, would prevent the recognition of any union formed via an open, public ballot.

Sounds like hostage-taking, doesn' it?  "Join the union, or else," in so many words.  Followed by, "vote Democrat, or else."  And the damage that an unchecked, mafia-ized Big Labor would do to both the American body politic and the private sector economy - it'd be incalculable.  Gone woud be business innovation and flexibility and productivity.  Business small and large would be ensnared, wrestled to the proverbial ground, and bound & gagged with constrictive restrictions and saddled with ruinous wage & benefit costs.  The balance between management and labor, the boundless prosperity of 1982-2007, and the freedom of workers would all be destroyed.

I've long argued that in the economy of the 21st century, unions are obsolete relics of a bygone era that serve no useful purpose, and certainly nothing like what they were originally created to address.  Instead they are the brownshirts of the Donk Left (Remember the 1996 "Mediscare" campaign?), Red Barry's rabblerousers working toward liberalism's sacred goal of bringing down the American economy in preparation for the final transformation of the U.S. into a one-party communist state.

And congressional Republicans, God bless 'em, are not waiting for the hammer to fall but are framing the issue first (protecting American workers from the Big Labor thugs who would kidnap them) so as to put the Democrats on the PR defensive.  Another plank in a 2010/2012 populist GOP platform that will well-nigh unstoppable.

~  ~  ~

In a similar vein, the whistle-blowing chorus against the Global Warming Hoax continues to get bigger and louder.  And its newest members hail from the land of the rising driver of Earth's climate:

Japanese scientists have made a dramatic break with the United Nations’ view on man-made global warming with a report asserting that “this hypothesis has been substituted for truth.”

Three of the five researchers involved in the report disagree with the view of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that recent warming is due primarily to industrial emissions of greenhouse gases, and say it is instead driven by natural cycles.

The report was issued by the Japan Society of Energy and Resources, an academic group representing scientists from the energy and resource fields that acts as a government advisory panel. The report has been translated from the Japanese by The Register in Britain.

Kanya Kusano, Program Director for the Earth Simulator at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science & Technology, compares computer climate modeling used to support the man-made global warming theory to “ancient astrology.”

He states that the IPCC’s “conclusion that from now on atmospheric temperatures are likely to show a continuous, monotonous increase should be perceived as an unprovable hypothesis.”

Shunichi Akasofu, head of the International Arctic Research Center in Alaska, agrees: “IPCC’s theory that atmospheric temperature has risen since 2000 in correspondence with [carbon dioxide increases] is nothing but a hypothesis.”

Among the points made in the report:

CO2 emissions began to increase significantly after 1946 and are still rising. Therefore, according to the IPCC, global atmospheric temperatures should continue to increase. However, temperatures stopped increasing in 2001.

The global temperature increase up to today is primarily a recovery from the “Little Ice Age” that Earth experienced from 1400 to 1800. This rise peaked in 2000.

Global warming and the “halting of the temperature rise are related to solar activity.” [emphases added] 

As poetic as the old Bhuddist canard of the beat of a butterfly's wing setting off a chain of events triggering the continent-spanning hypercane with super-duper freeze ray capability in The Day After Tomorrow may be, as a scientific climatological model, it bears far more than a passing resemblance to those little nuggets that keep turning up in my cat's litter box on a daily basis.  It doesn't require a phD to grasp that the biggest, the overwhelming single factor outweighing all the others by crushing proportions in the determination of terrestrial climate change or lack thereof is not anything poor, old mankind could EVER do, but that big lamp hanging in the sky, otherwise known as Sol.  Shutting down our modern post-industrial society and reverting back to agrarian, hunter-gathering, cave-dwelling primitivism (other than the Obamunist oberfuehrers whose jobs it would be to keep us there, or else - they never apply their demiurgical commandments to themselves) would not halt climate change in any direction one jot or tittle - but it sure would give Democrats a whooooole lotta power.

Which makes this follow-up all the more telling:

An analysis by the Center for Public Integrity found that more than 770 companies and interest groups hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists in the past year to influence federal policy.

Politico.com notes that since 2003, the number of global warming lobbyists has risen by more than 300%, and “Washington can now boast more than four climate lobbyists for every member of Congress.”

If global warming and modern civilization being the cause of it are the "facts" that greenstremist Elmer Gantreys like Fat Albert claim, why would lobbying even be necessary?  Particularly in a Congress as lopsidedly Donk as this one?

UPDATE: So much for Red Barry's "cap & trade" scheme.  Guess it'll go right along with all the other failed hard-left nonsense he's bulldozing through anyway.  I'd say he's slitting his own throat, only Obamunists don't appear to HAVE necks.

Close on the heels of King Hussein's vow to "move on the immigration issue in the next several months," his chief of staff Raum Emanuel is lining up the election-rigging patos (via Newsmax Insider):

As a major force behind the Democrats' takeover of Congress in the 2006 elections, Representative Rahm Emanuel was seen as stalling House consideration of immigration reform for fear of a backlash against Democratic candidates.

But now as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, "Emanuel is removing roadblocks that stand in the way of some of the legislative agenda benefitting immigration, ethnic minorities and their advocates," Politico.com reported.

Frank Sharry, head of America’s Voice — an organization working for immigration reform, including earned citizenship for undocumented immigrants — told Politico: "Emanuel is a symbol of going from running away from immigration to someone who now says, 'Lean into immigration. It will help Democrats.'"

Emanuel recently engineered increased benefits for legal immigrant children and pregnant women in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Emanuel warned key senators that the bill would not be signed without those benefits.

Emanuel also promised Hispanic and black legislators that the Obama administration would have the next Census director report to White House staffers as well as to the Commerce secretary on the 2010 count, which will determine future political representation and the allocation of federal funds. The Bureau is legally under the control of the Commerce Department.

"On both issues, Emanuel showed an appreciation for the high Hispanic voter turnout and support for Democrats in 2008," Politico observed.

Representative William Lacy Clay, a Missouri Democrat who oversees the House subcommittee on the Census, said: "I do welcome the president’s and Rahm’s and the entire White House team’s involvement" in the 2010 Census.

But Republicans have expressed concern that the White House will bring politics into the Census.

"They are going to move it from Commerce and from the Census Bureau and put it into the White House, and you will have politics come back into the process, when the Census Bureau has worked for decades to rid itself of political influence," Representative Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, told Newsmax.

"I just find that so very unfortunate and I’m tremendously disappointed and very very concerned about this happening."

Time was when "the American dream" for immigrants meant coming to America to pull your own weight and avail yourself of the limitless opportunities to become whatever you wanted to become through your own hard work.  Today it means ambling over the border to sign up for American welfare benefits, a driver's license, and a voter registration card with a big, f'ing "D" on it.

Today's "dream" isn't that of the immigrant, but of the Obamunist junta that plots to hold them down and exploit them as ruthlessly as the corrupt regime south of the border they will never really leave behind.  And eventually, we'll all be just as oppressed and impoverished as they are.

S'no wonder Red Barry isn't worried about Mexican instablity.  If he can get the entire country to move up here, he'll be president-for-eternity.

Proactivity is the lifeblood of leadership.  Just ask South Carolina Republican Senator Jim DeMint, who isn't willing to passively sit back and allow the Right to be bureaucratically bound and gagged in the dead of night, but is flipping on the megawatt klieg lights before the Donkstapo can complete the shredding of the First Amendment:

Senator Jim DeMint announced that he will force a vote [this] week on a bill that prevents the Federal Communications Commission from reinstating the Fairness Doctrine.

The South Carolina Republican’s bill, the Broadcaster Freedom Act, is co-sponsored by John Thune, R-SD, and twenty-seven others and will be offered as an amendment to the D.C. Voting Rights bill.

President Barack Obama is opposed to any move to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, spokesman Ben LaBolt said Wednesday.

But as Senator DeMint notes in a statement, some Democrats in Congress have indicated that they would support a reinstatement...

"I'm glad President Obama finally confirmed his opposition to the Fairness Doctrine, which attacks the right of free speech on talk radio, but many Democrats in Congress are still pushing it.

“With the support of the new administration, now is the time for Congress to take a stand against this kind of censorship. I intend to seek a vote on this amendment next week so every senator is on record: Do you support free speech or do you want to silence voices you disagree with?"

Don't kid yourself; Red Barry is just as pro-censorship as the rest of his party.  He just doesn't want himself or his junta to be seen that way, which is why they would not reimpose the FD legislatively (forcing him to take just the sort of visible public stand that makes him break out in hives), or even bureaucractically in that guise. (In other words, they'll never do it honestly and openly.) Instead, they'd use the cover of "localism" and "station ownership diversity" to phase it in by attrition.  Like the proverbial frog in the slow-boiling plot, most Americans wouldn't realize what was happening until it was too late.

On second thought, if the Dems REALLY wanted PR cover, Crazy Nancy and Dirty Harry could ram through Fairness Doctrine legislation for the express purpose of giving King Hussein a chance to make a big "bipartisan" show of vetoing it.  That would buy at least a huge, guard-letting-down sigh of relief on the Right and appear to settle the issue, after which Red Barry could quietly impose it "behind the curtain".

Senator DeMint's BFA tears down that curtain by pre-empting any such legislative cover.  Particularly by linking it to a bill that Donks almost dare not oppose, it puts them between the rock of outraging "Black America" by opposing a voting rights bill in order to expose themselves on the legislative record as avowed enemies of free political speech and making it politically exceedingly difficult to ram or sneak through any center-right muzzlings after the fact.

I would expect Dirty Harry to try and muster some sort of corrupt parliamentary chicanery to detach the BFA amendment from the voting rights bill so that the former can be buried.  Failing that, though, I can't see so public a fight over the blatant evisceration of the core of the Bill of Rights being one the Donk Politburo really wants to undertake.  Not with their communization plate so full, and their governing boat already taking on water so alarmingly.

***Guess who else is running for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination?:

Former GOP presidential candidate [and Arkansas governor] Mike Huckabee in an exclusive Newsmax interview says President Obama’s early job performance is “cause for alarm,” and warns his penchant for talking down the economy is “the worst possible direction he could take.”

Obama’s dark portrayal of the U.S. economy - apparently intended to lower the high expectations stoked by his rhetoric during the campaign - is on the verge of becoming a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” Huckabee adds.

The former Arkansas governor’s criticism followed a week that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a six-year low. The S & P 500, the index that most trading professionals rely on as a market barometer, closed the week at its lowest level in twelve years....

Noting that Obama has lost several high Cabinet appointees due to tax and other issues, Huckabee says early indications regarding the quality of the president’s judgment don’t look promising.

“I think it’s cause for alarm,” Huckabee tells Newsmax. “He seems to be tone deaf to his own music. I was very, very disappointed to see him abandon his own rhetoric, as it relates to transparency, ethics, about a new way of doing things in Washington.

“I mean, on and on he talked about how he wasn’t going to have a Washington run by a bunch of lobbyists, then about every appointment he makes is given the exception clause, [he’s] appointing people and then insisting they get confirmed who didn’t pay their taxes.

“Those are not the kinds of things that inspire confidence in the lives of people out there in the middle of America who aren’t given a free ride to wait years and years until they’re appointed to some federal job before they pay up,” he adds.

Remarkable, isn't it?  The Golden Child may be doing what nobody would have thought possible: building a political market niche for the resurrection of Huckles' economic populism gimmick in a right-wing guise.  Who says False Messiah isn't a miracle-worker?

***If my theory is correct that the Democrats are in a frantic rush to use the 2009-10 biennium to lock in the current political alignment in perpetuity, one of the things they would have to push the crap out of is the "comprehensive immigration reform" legislation that has gotten throttled in the previous two congresses.  Legalizing existing illegals would provide the Donks with twelve million instant new constituents, enough to perhaps turn states as "red" as Arizona and Texas "blue" and electorally bury the GOP for good.

Never mind the overkill of census gerrymandering, gentlebeings; shamnesty would do the job quite well all by itself.

And, sho' nuff....:

Despite the fact that federal, state and local governments are reeling from a fiscal crisis, President Barack Obama is sticking to plans to help an estimated twelve million illegal aliens gain citizenship.

Last week, Obama called into Univision Radio's Eddie "Piolin" Sotelo show, fulfilling a promise to be a guest if elected.

"I promised you that I would be on the show when I was president, and here I am on the show," Obama told Sotelo.

Asked by Sotelo about the issue of immigration, Obama promised action soon.

Obama said: "Well, as I've said every time I’ve been on the show, Piolín, we're going to make sure that we begin the process of dealing with the immigration system that's broken. We're going to start by really trying to work on how to improve the current system so that people who want to be naturalized, who want to become citizens, like you did, that they are able to do it; that it's cheaper, that it's faster, that they have an easier time in terms of sponsoring family members. And then we've got to have comprehensive immigration reform."

Obama added he was "very committed" to move on the immigration issue in the next several months.

Also in more than enough time for the 2010 mid-terms that might otherwise be gearing up for a reprise of 1994.  The prevention of which is doubtless something to which the Chicago Cherubim is also "very committed."

***A message to Bibi, perhaps?:

The respected Foreign Policy magazine's Web site column The Cable reported last week that President Barack Obama is set to appoint a fierce critic of Israel to his National Intelligence Council.

The web site reported: "Sources tell The Cable that Chas W. Freeman, Jr., the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, will become chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the intelligence community's primary big-think shop and the lead body in producing national intelligence estimates."

The Cable quoted Freeman as telling associates that "he will occasionally accompany Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair to give the president his daily intelligence briefing."

The choice of Freeman, who will reportedly play a key role in shaping U.S. intelligence estimates, has pro-Israel groups in a tizzy.

Perhaps that's why the newly restored Israeli Prime Minister is pledging to "work with" King Hussein.  After all, leaving aside the precariousness of his governing coalition, even Mr. Netanyahu can't afford to bite the hand that's slapping him.

Until it's time to send the IAF into Iran to bomb the mullahs back to the stone age before they can do it to the Jews, anyway.

Imagine the Dems' blithering rage if Karl Rove had ever made this announcement:

White House political adviser David Axelrod says the Obama administration’s plan to put the U.S. Census Bureau under the control of top administration officials will keep the bureau in expert hands.

Axelrod, appearing on FOX News Sunday With Chris Wallace, said that, despite the the West Wing's move to manage the bureau, the census would continue to “be in the charge of the professionals who conduct it."

Since when was there a move underway to place the Census Bureau in the hands of incompetents?  I must have missed that memo.  Certainly Axelrod doesn't elaborate on that unspoken motivation, probably because he's not capable of putting over that gaping a lie.

Which leaves us with the obvious motivation - and a twisted re-definition of the word "expert":

Republicans, who oppose the move on the grounds that it will politicize the 2010 census, say supervision of it by the Democratic Party will taint the results and skew new congressional representative district lines for the 2012 elections.

Last week, U.S. Representative Marsha Blackburn, R-TN, weighed in on the move by telling Newsmax TV she and her fellow Commerce Committee members are "terribly disappointed and very concerned" that Obama wants to end the traditional autonomy of the bureau by placing it directly under the control of the White House.

“This is a very dangerous move,” Blackburn said.

Blackburn and her GOP colleagues, including Representative Jason Chafitz, R-UT, who calls the move nothing more than a Democratic political grap, fear the takeover of the census is a not-so-disguised effort by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to pad the number of Democrats in the House.

Like that isn't obvious.  But given that the Hussein Junta is never going to be challenged on this deck-stacking maneuver by either the rubber-stamp Donk congressional supermajorities or the worshipful Obamedia, the only thing hopelessly outnumbered 'Pubbies can do is raise as much of a stink about it as they can - until they're smeared into political oblivion by Red Barry's fixers or arrested by Red Barry's thugs, anyway.  Which, come to think of it, would provide its own publicity.

Judging by this letter to the Junta, this is something on which GOPers may actually be willing to go down fighting:

"Any attempt by the Obama administration to circumvent the census process for their political benefit will be met with fierce opposition,” U.S. Representative Darrell Issa, R-CA, wrote in a letter to Obama. The letter, co-signed by North Carolina Representative Patrick McHenry, refers to the move by the administration as “an ill-conceived proposal [that] undermines a constitutionally obligated process that speaks to the very heart of our democracy."

The letter also targeted Emanuel, stating: “Requiring the Census Director to report directly to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is a shamefully transparent attempt by your Administration to politicize the Census Bureau and manipulate the 2010 Census.”

Why does this "fierce resistance" matter?  Because there's a mid-term election between now and when this politicized census would take effect.  And Red Barry's attempt to hijack the congressional election process would make one more potent GOP issue amongst many that will be a-percolating in what could be shaping up to be a 1994-magnitude blowback.

Ken Blackwell - former Ohio Secretary of State and odds-on favorite to unseat either Ted Strickland or Sherrod Brown for that state's governorship or Senate seat in 2012, IMHO - examines Red Barry's congressional election-fixing blueprints.

Lowell Ponte provides us with a tragicomic look at Red Barry's latest global warming chicken littlest:

The Golden State could become a desert wasteland, with no more winter salad greens from its parched Central Valley or wines from its withered Napa-Sonoma vineyards, before this century ends unless America takes drastic steps to slow global warming, warned U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

“We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California,” Chu told The Los Angeles Times, adding, “I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going.”

Cities such as Los Angeles and San Diego could become sandstorm-blasted ghost towns, Chu seemed to be saying.

January had been unusually dry, the start of a third dry year in a row for California. But soon after Chu's interview, rain began falling. Rainstorm after rainstorm – an average of one every two days – rolled across and drenched much of the state. By February 10, water-short San Diego had surged to two inches above its normal-to-date rainfall, and southland mountain ski lodges opened quickly.

This rain pattern continues, with huge storms expected to thicken the Northern Sierra snowpack that supplies much of California's water when it melts. The snowpack was only 61% of its usual thickness when Chu voiced concern about a drought.

“It's the Gore Effect,” says a laughing James Taylor, editor of the Heartland Institute think tank journal Environment & Climate News. “Almost every time global warming doomsayer Al Gore speaks or his movie is shown, unusual cold or blizzards happen. And now we have the Chu Effect. He warns of global warming-caused drought in California, and the heavens reply with almost nonstop rains. Maybe somebody up there is trying to tell us something.”

With little or no planetary warming since 1998, alarmists and climate opportunists point increasingly to brief regional droughts as second-hand evidence of global warming.

“It's amazing how many big-mouth global warming alarmists get media attention who were never trained as climatologists,” Patrick Michaels, a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, tells Newsmax. [emphasis added]

One cannot help but wonder why anybody still pays attention to these gross frauds.  In the story of the boy who cried wolf, it only took a few days for the townspeople to catch on to the fact that the boy was full of it and cease listening to him anymore.  Yet they've been shriek-peddling this "manmade climate change" BS for close to twenty years, and somehow, through sheer volume it's become the conventional "wisdom" - despite the embarrasing obviousness that the "emperor," as it were, has no clothes:

Chu is the latest example. He is a brilliant physicist who shared a 1997 Nobel Prize for his research into how to manipulate atoms with lasers. He has been director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology at the University of California Berkeley. But like most global warming doomsayers, Chu has no degree in atmospheric sciences, meteorology, or climatology.

Like many scientists eager to influence national policy, Chu became an outspoken activist in fields far from his expertise. He joined the Copenhagen Climate Council, a private collaboration between science and business to promote a 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in the Danish capital — and, it acknowledges, to use "emotional storytelling" about global warming.

I.e. Reckless, hysterical, irresponsible, flagrantly dishonest fearmongering designed to panic the public into a stampede toward coughing up their constitutional and economic liberties to fight a "crisis" that doesn't exist.  Judging by Chu-Chu's aforequoted ridiculous science fantasizing, we have little difficulty seeing why False Messiah dubbed him to be one of his false apostles.

And fear not, for Chu-Chu's ignorant hard-left pedigree is quite thorough:

Chu has been reluctant to embrace nuclear power, even though it emits no greenhouse gases, out of concerns with its waste and proliferation safety. He also finds problems with clean coal technologies, even though America's huge reserves make it “the Saudi Arabia of coal” and offer a clear path to energy independence.

“Coal is my worst nightmare,” says Chu, who describes the typical coal plant's radioactive fly-ash pollution as giving off a hundred times more radiation than a nuclear plant.

As an adviser, Chu may have influenced candidate Barack Obama's January 17, 2008, statement to the San Francisco Chronicle that he planned pollution taxes that would “bankrupt” anyone who tried to build a coal-powered plant.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch in the burgeoning California Desert, you could say that to the degree that there is a "drought," it comes from the fact that there are thirty-six million people now living in California, and the obstacles to supplying that unprecedented water demand have nothing to do with smokestacks and carbon footprints and everything to do with dark robes:

Los Angeles gets most of its water from Northern California. L.A.'s biggest threat of water shortage comes not from drought but from Federal District Court Judge Oliver Wanger.

On September 1, 2007, this judge put strict limits on the pumping of water each December to June from the San Joaquin-Sacramento River delta to protect a 3-inch-long endangered fish, the Delta Smelt. This ruling costs Southern California up to 30% of what used to be its California Aqueduct water each year. (President George H.W. Bush appointed Wanger a federal judge in 1991.)

Therefore, the global warming alarmists are strangely correct. Man causes much of the water shortage in large areas of California — and that man is a federal judge.

Keep all this in mind when contemplating the fearmongering that propelled Hogzilla, and the "WE MUST ACT NOW!!!!!" hysterics that will power TARP II and Hogzilla II and more auto industry bailouts and whatever other "stimulus" hoaxes follow them, all in the name of an "economic recovery" that Red Barry's "climate change" schemes will pre-empt before it can ever get started.

Who knows, it might even lead to a regime-change in Washington in 2010 and 2012.  That's a crisis that really does need to be addressed ASAP.

Bullbleep....

....more bullbleep....

....censoring those who publicly call it bullbleep - which renders King Hussein's prior denials of intent to that end still more bullbleep....

....and the Braveheartian defense of eternally and publicly proclaiming it bullbleep until the Bullbleep Messiah gets flushed.

Says Double-H on the descending Iron Curtain:

The constitutionally-suspect nature of the drive for "balance" may not deter the Congressional left, but using a position of dominant political power to attempt to silence critics would unleash a huge blowback and not just from listeners, but from all Americans who would recoil from the idea that majorities would be used to silence opposition.

One would like to think so.  Poll numbers like this suggest so.  The fact that the Dems aren't bothering to conceal their true communist authoritarian agenda practically guarantees so.

Kinda makes the next twenty months and change to the 2010 midterms a race against time, doesn't it?