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Great piece on the danger to our freedom posed by environmentalists. In the Guardian, UK, no less, by an iconoclast named Brendan O’Neill. The title and sub-title are; Greens are the enemies of liberty, Environmentalists want to curb our freedom far more than the government’s anti-terrorist laws ever will.
… In the current debate on liberty, we hear a lot about the attack on our democratic rights by the government’s security agenda, but little about the grave impact of environmentalism on the fabric of freedom. It seems to me that green thinking – with its shrill intolerance of dissenting views, its deep distaste for free movement and free choice, and its view of individuals, not as history-makers, but as filthy polluters – poses a more profound threat to liberty even than the government’s paranoid anti-terrorist agenda.
Environmentalists are innately hostile to freedom of speech. Last month James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate change scientists, said the CEOs of oil companies should be tried for crimes against humanity and nature. They have been “putting out misinformation”, he said, and “I think that’s a crime”. This follows green writer Mark Lynas’s insistence that there should be “international criminal tribunals” for climate change deniers, who will be “partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths”. They will “have to answer for their crimes”, he says. The American eco-magazine Grist recently published an article on deniers that called for “war crimes trials for these bastards… some sort of climate Nuremberg.” …
Neal Boortz has an example.
The Environmental Protection Agency is determined to do everything it can to regulate your lives. Last Friday the EPA issued an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking … that’s a fancy way of saying “asinine government regulations on the economy and your lives.”
Take this one for example. The EPA wants to get its hands on your lawnmower. Yep. …
Speaking of losing liberty, John Stossel thinks there are too many traffic laws.
… Please. I’m all for highway safety, but I suspect that America’s roads have too many rules, and that gives cops too much arbitrary power to harass people or profit off them. As the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-Tse said, “The more laws that are written, the more criminals are produced”.
I bet most Americans roll through stop signs. I do. It makes for a smoother ride, and it saves gas.
“ABC News” put cameras by stop signs in Warren, Mich., and in New York City. The video showed that in Warren, 72 percent of drivers did not come to a complete stop. In New York, 82 percent kept going.
Warren and other towns probably have too many stop signs. There’s no proof that more signs save lives. Studies show that sometimes installing stop signs lowers accident rates, but in some cases more accidents occurred after signs were installed. …
James Kirchick thinks the Dems have strange ways to improve our image abroad.
… In the simplistic narrative of the Obama boosters, President Bush and his party’s successor, John McCain, are cranky nationalists who view the world through the barrel of a gun. But the fact is, in this election it is the Democratic candidate who is proposing policies profoundly at odds with his promise to restore America’s preeminent place in the world.
Take the issue of trade. In Senate debates earlier this year, Obama vocally opposed free trade deals with both South Korea and Colombia. Asked what Congress’s failure to pass the Colombia Free Trade Act would mean for bilateral relations between his country and the United States, Colombian president Alvaro Uribe replied, “It would be very serious.” …
Power Line lists three of the many groups that own the Dems.
WSJ Op-Ed outlines the GOP’s record on race.
John McCain is scheduled to address the NAACP’s annual convention in Cincinnati, Ohio, today. Although he is unlikely to gain many black votes this year, he should use the occasion to increase Republican efforts to reach out to African-Americans. He can start by setting the record straight on the records of the two parties on race.
Everyone knows this, but it’s worth repeating: the Republican Party is the party of Abraham Lincoln and was established in 1854 to block the expansion of slavery. The Democratic Party was the party of slavery: Its two founders, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, owned large numbers of slaves, and every party platform before the Civil War defended the institution unequivocally.
After the war, it was the Republican Party that rammed through the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution over Democratic opposition. Republicans also enacted a series of civil-rights laws that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which basically did what the Civil Rights Act of 1964 accomplished. …
Clint Bolick points the way to another chance for McCain.
Education is slipping in priority among many voters but not among Hispanics, many of whom see school choice as a deciding factor in whom to vote for this fall. This has implications for the presidential election.
A new poll shows that 82% of Hispanics consider education as one of three most important issues facing this country. The survey also shows that, even while Hispanics trust Democrats over Republicans on education by more than a two-to-one margin, that ratio could change if Republicans heavily promote school choice while Democrats oppose it. …
David Remnick, New Yorker editor, defends the cover saying, in effect, they were just trying to help. Maureen Dowd, to her credit, is having none of that in, “May We Mock, Barack?”
… If Obama keeps being stingy with his quips and smiles, and if the dominant perception of him is that you can’t make jokes about him, it might infect his campaign with an airless quality. His humorlessness could spark humor.
On Tuesday, Andy Borowitz satirized on that subject. He said that Obama, sympathetic to comics’ attempts to find jokes to make about him, had put out a list of official ones, including this:
“A traveling salesman knocks on the door of a farmhouse, and much to his surprise, Barack Obama answers the door. The salesman says, ‘I was expecting the farmer’s daughter.’ Barack Obama replies, ‘She’s not here. The farm was foreclosed on because of subprime loans that are making a mockery of the American dream.’ ” …
If the GOP wants to win, they should read this Dick Morris column everyday until November.
… Obama’s breathtaking flips and flops are materially different from McCain’s. While McCain had opposed offshore oil drilling and now supports it, the facts have obviously changed. Obama’s shifts have nothing to do with altered circumstances, just a change in the political calendar.
As a candidate who was nominated to be a different kind of politician, Obama has set the bar pretty high. And, with his flipping and flopping, he is falling short, to the disillusionment of his more naïve supporters. One wag even called him the “black Bill Clinton,” a turnaround of the “first black president” moniker that had been pinned on Bill.
Meanwhile, McCain and the Republicans have finally found an issue — oil drilling — exposing how the Democrats oppose drilling virtually anywhere that there might be recoverable oil. Not in Alaska. Not offshore. Not in shale deposits in the West. The Democratic claim that we “cannot drill our way out of the crisis in gas prices” begs the question of whether, had we drilled five years ago, we would be a lot less dependent on foreign market fluctuations.
The truth is that the Democrats put the need to mitigate climate change ahead of the imperative of holding down gasoline prices at the pump. If there was ever a fault line between elitist and populist approaches to a problem, this is it. In fact, liberals basically don’t see much wrong with $5 gas. Many have been urging a tax to achieve precisely this level, just like Europe has done for decades.
Obama said that he was unhappy that there was not a period of “gradual adjustment” to the high prices, but seems to shed few tears over the current levels. After all, if your imperative is climate change, a high gas price is worth 10 times a ratified Kyoto treaty in bringing about change. …
As regards Obama’s campaign, Thomas Sowell asks if facts are obsolete.
In an election campaign in which not only young liberals, but also some people who are neither young nor liberals, seem absolutely mesmerized by the skilled rhetoric of Barack Obama, facts have receded even further into the background than usual.
As the hypnotic mantra of “change” is repeated endlessly, few people even raise the question of whether what few specifics we hear represent any real change, much less a change for the better.
Raising taxes, increasing government spending and demonizing business? That is straight out of the New Deal of the 1930s.
The New Deal was new then but it is not new now. Moreover, increasing numbers of economists and historians have concluded that New Deal policies are what prolonged the Great Depression.
Putting new restrictions of international trade, in order to save American jobs? That was done by Herbert Hoover, when he signed the Hawley-Smoot tariff when the unemployment rate was 9 percent. The next year the unemployment rate was 16 percent and, before the Great Depression was over, unemployment hit 25 percent.
One of the most naive notions is that politicians are trying to solve the country’s problems, just because they say so— or say so loudly or inspiringly. …
Corner posts demonstrate why Ohio’s economy is on the skids. A Plain Dealer blog post was the kick-off for this.
A behemoth lies in our midst, sucking in ever greater amounts of cash and growing at twice the rate of inflation.
What’s more, we’re feeding it with billions and billions of tax dollars. An unprecedented study released today shows that the combined cost of government across 16 northeastern Ohio counties — teaching our children, running our cities and tending myriad other public services — had reached at least $16 billion by 2002.
That amounted to $3,750 for every man, woman and child in the targeted region, which includes counties including Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Medina, Portage and Summit.
The $175,000 study, paid for by civic and business leaders to gauge government spending, used the latest available U.S. census data to look at 800 publicly funded entities in the region.
And while the numbers are dated and incomplete, they suggest our system of governance is bloated and drags down the region’s economy, according to the people who commissioned the study. …