Sunday, December 7, 2008

Stupid is as Stupid Does

The great American philosopher, Forest Gump uttered those memorable words. He also said, “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you will get.” I can’t help but think of these two gems when I ponder what the new Obama Administration and the new solidly Democrat Congress will do in the coming year.

From the appointments we’ve seen so far it seems the “Change We Can Believe In” amounts to rehiring all the guys from the Clinton team. If memory serves Clinton was quite radical in his first two years… until the alarmed electorate voted in a Republican Congress in 1996. Clinton then got religion and governed more like the centrist he claimed to be.

Observers have tried to be optimistic that BHO, Pelosi and Reid would show some restraint with the economy in a shambles, but recent comments from the anointed ones do not inspire confidence. On the economic front it looks like the only idea anyone has is to throw more and more money at the problem. Damn the torpedoes of inflation or the ice burgs of government ownership of major industries. Don’t worry about the distant shoals of debt. Open the valves of spending. Full speed ahead!

Once the new Congress gets sworn in and get their furniture rearranged we should expect quick action on two Democrat pet projects: the Employee Free Choice Act and the Fairness Doctrine. These two turkeys could only have been named by Orwell’s Ministry of Truth for there is no “free choice” in the former or “fairness” in the latter.

The EFC Act is a sop to the unions who love the Democrats unconditionally and give them millions. Better known as the Card Check bill it makes it substantially easier to organize a union shop. Less than 10% of the US workforce is currently unionized, mostly government employees and workers in major industries. Union shops like automobile manufacturers and airlines have been falling like flies lately and entrenched unions rightly deserve a lot of the blame. Government unions produce no measurable product and even if they do (like the teachers unions) and the product is crap, they persist. This does not suggest greater unionization is a wonderful idea in this time of economic trouble.

The Fairness Doctrine is only designed to put conservative talk radio out of business. The left already controls the mainstream media…. TV, Hollywood and the major newspapers. This violation of the 1st Amendment would silence any dissent of the left wing agenda.

While some of Obama’s economic team may have convinced him that raising taxes during a recession is a formula for financial disaster, he seems determined to push ahead with his fight against global warming with his Cap and Trade program. He said recently, “[we] will establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80% by 2050.” Remember, Obama promised during the campaign to bankrupt anyone who attempted to build a coal fired power plant.

VP candidate Biden in one of his memorable gaffs said, “We’re not supporting clean coal” and “…no coal plants here in America.” Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader and dipshit buffoon, once said, “That is, coal makes us sick, oil makes us sick; it’s global warming. It’s ruining our country; it’s ruining our World. We’ve got to stop using fossil fuel.” Harry and BHO probably never bothered to check, but the US gets 85% of its energy needs from fossil fuels and 50% of the US electrical power is supplied by coal plants. Do they really believe that they can replace fossil fuel with solar and wind power? Does anyone believe that the radical environmentalists will ever allow the Democrats to build a single nuclear plant? Their only hope of replacing coal is nuclear and they can’t go there.

The significant phrase in Obama’s quote above is “strong annual targets”. That suggests to me that he plans to use the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and implement his Cap and Trade dreams through that behemoth. The EPA has already prepared an 18,000-page Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) document regulating every emitting source from coal plants to lawn mowers. It amounts to a tax on energy, will cost trillions and wipe out jobs by the millions. Estimates from the Heritage Foundation suggest net job losses (that’s after you add in the “green” jobs created) at 500,000 per year and a cost of $5000 per household. American companies will be leaving the country in droves.

While this madness continues to rumble down the tracks we get this update on global warming from the US National Climatic Data Center. Seems the global temperature went DOWN in 2008 with some parts of the world seeing snow for the first time in memory. 2008 saw record snowfalls in China and Canada (Toronto’s Feb. snowfall the most since 1950). Sea ice build up in Antarctica was the largest in 30 years and even the much-discussed Artic saw increases of 10 to 20cm of ice. Nothing in yet from the polar bears.

[Editor's note: In April 2007, the news release about the dire situation of the Polar Bear was exposed by an Australian journalist as a hoax. The photo was not taken by Canadian environmentalists, but taken by a marine biology student more than two years before in the month of August--when ice caps are naturally melting--and the bear was within easy swimming distance of larger chunks of land; it was released by the AP along with the introduction of the UN's Global Warming Report.]

[Also, there are more reports from a group of international scientists on the global warming nonsense.]

According to Kenneth Tapping of the Canadian National Research Council, solar activity is way down. “The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted five centuries and ended in 1850.” Gee, maybe the sun has something to do with global warming? OK, one winter does not an ice age make. But, it should give everyone a reason to look a little more critically at the absurd contortions of the global warming fanatics. More importantly, it should give our politicians pause before imposing an economy destroying policy on North America. You’d think, but I’m not betting on it.

Don’t count on the Democrats allowing any more drilling for oil or gas either. That’s way too logical.

1 comment:

Heide said...

Speaking of Forrest Gump and our country's economic state, this fellow summed it up pretty well in terms that even I can understand!
http://sourdoughblaugh.blogspot.com/2008/10/forrest-gump-explains-mortgage-backed.html