Government Gone Wild

Democrats have drawn the battle lines quite clearly.  2010 is the year we fight. 

Not with bullets or by shouting people down, but with the most lethal weapon we possess:  Our vote.  Check your county office to verify you are registered and help like-minded friends, family and co-workers to do the same.

As Dennis Prager is fond of saying "I prefer clarity to agreement."

Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have shown us what unbridled Democratic liberalism looks like.  With no pesky "Repugs" to stand in their way, they have shown their true colors, and every poll shows ordinary Americans don't like it. 

This year has provided us political and ideological clarity 
There are bright, stark lines dividing conservatives and the GOP from liberals and Democrats.  Democrats have embraced these kooky alien ideas while the minority Republicans have fought the good fight against them:
 

• Environmental legislation that would enrich government cronies while destroying our economy
• Refusing to drill for our own bountiful energy resources, while simultaneously refusing to build more nuclear power plants
• One-size-fits-all health care that enslaves doctors and their patients while bankrupting the nation 
• Buying up companies and telling them what to do, while playing favorites with crony capitalists
• A "Safe School" Czar who should not be allowed within 500 feet of any child
• Socialist academics eager to practice their theories on government and society, since no real-world enterprise would have anything to do with them and their loony ideologies

Government Gone Wild
But most of all, Democrats have brought us government as a hydra-headed monster poking a bureaucratic and regulatory snout into every corner of society.  Democrats stand for a statist solution to everything, leaving nothing but abortion to individual choice.

Can we stand up for liberty and freedom?  Liberty to make our own decisions, and freedom to fail?  Yes we can.  All we have to do is vote.

Global Community Organizing in Snarkenhagen

Obama takes community organizer shakedown skills global!

COPENHAGEN — A visibly angry Barack Obama threw down the gauntlet at China and other developing nations Friday, declaring that the time has come "not to talk but to act" on climate change. (Politico)

Saudi Arabia funds terrorists; A bloodthirsty, illegitimate Iranian regime murders its own people (and our troops in Iraq) and spreads terror in Lebanon, Palestine and points beyond; the Darfur slaughter and rape continues; Somali pirates disrupt international commerce...

But dammit!  President Obama is really mad that nations are balking at economically castrating themselves upon the altar of Gaia! 

And now for something completely different...
Gerald Warner turns his British wit on this Copenhagen farce, as only a British sarc-snark can:

When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying – what do you do? [...]

Unfortunately, the response of all intelligent people will be to fall about laughing; but it was worth a try – everybody loves a tryer – and the climate alarmists are no longer in a position to pick and choose their tactics.

The danger of this ploy, of course, is that people might say “If we are going to be chargrilled anyway, what is the point of handing over billions – better to get some serious conspicuous consumption in before the ski slopes turn into saunas.”

If you're as tired as I am of the flatulent cloud of hypocrital sanctimony emanating from Copenhagen, go read Gerald Warner's entire column.  It'll  hit the spot.

Cap and Trade: A Hopium Smoker's Pipe Dream

Democrats want to take us back to 1875
George Will, commenting on President Obama's flailing attempts to regain his mojo, incidentally mentions why Waxman-Markey (Cap and Trade) is an economically unfeasible pipe dream. 

I broke it up into smaller bites to make it easier to follow.  Follow it through to the end and you will see how this crazy scheme requires the nation to reduce its per capita carbon dioxide level to what it was back in 1875.  We cannot do this and survive economically.  

That legislation is a particularly lurid illustration of why no serious person nowadays takes seriously Washington's increasingly infantile bandying of numbers.

The point of cap-and-trade is to impose a ceiling on the nation's greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions—primarily carbon dioxide. The legislation endorses the goal of holding the global carbon--dioxide level to a maximum of 450 parts per million by 2050. That. Will. Not. Happen.

Steven Hayward and Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute do the math.

Waxman--Markey endorses the goal of reducing all of this nation's GHG emissions 83 percent below 2005 levels by 2050.

In 2005, the United States' carbon-dioxide emissions were 6 billion tons, so an 83 percent -reduction would permit about 1 billion tons—what America's emissions were in 1910, when the population was 92 million and the economy was one twenty-fifth of today's.

But by 2050, the population probably will be about 420 million, so per capita carbon-dioxide emissions would have to be 2.4 tons—one quarter of 1910's per capita emissions.

Today France, which generates approximately 80 percent of its electricity by nuclear power, and Switzerland, which generates most of its electricity by nuclear or hydropower, have per capita emissions of 6.59 and 6.13 tons, respectively.

To see the original AEI article Will cites, go here.  Is is long but full of hard facts and detailed explanations. 

The Democrats want to cut our per capita emissions to one-third of nuclear-powered France, and not one stooge in the press has asked them how we get there from here without destroying our economy.
  
Further Reading:
Pethokoukis
WaPo - CBO Estimate

Liberalism Kills

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent
-- Adam Smith

Mike Huckabee is in the news. Back when he was Arkansas governor, his misguided bleeding Christian heart led him to release a criminal who showed his gratitude by killing four police officers in cold blood.  

Blame everybody but the criminal...
The brutal gang rape last month of a young woman at a high school dance evoked the expected response from the San Fran Sicko Cornicle. It's society's fault, poverty, white people, bla bla bla... Blame everyone and everything but the dirty bastards who committed the crime.

Their claptrap is not even worth repeating here. Michele Catalano at Pajamas Media provides welcome disinfectant for this liberal BS. But somebody has to be at fault, starting with the young men who perpetrated the crime.

The culprits are not video games and desensitization. It’s partly the fault of poverty and partly the fault of parents who have lost control of their kids and their own lives. It’s a school district that didn’t provide its students with the security and safety precautions necessary given the circumstances.

Liberalism Frees the Prisoners and Imprisons the Innocent  
Liberalism has failed our society in so many ways, especially when it comes to crime. Dreamy criminal coddling programs of the 60's launched an explosion of criminality that has destroyed whole communities.  

Good people, mostly poor minorities, are prisoners in their homes and schools. Social mores are dictated by the false machismo of street thugs. Young boys want to be like them. Young girls want to be liked by them. It's twisted, in that stockholm syndrome way that abused spouses and children struggle to please the abuser.  

One way to reliably bring down the crime rate 

Zero tolerance. You go Eliot Ness on their asses and haul them off to jail. If they refuse to go you gun them down in the street like the rabid dogs they are. In prison, you take away all exercise equipment and put them on a subsistence diet. You should be walking out of prison a 98 pound weakling, not Mike Tyson. 

If the young wanna-be sees that the path to glory he contemplates is not so glorious after all, he is much more likely to look for something more productive. The specter of death or a stint in prison that makes you not a returning hero but an emaciated loser can be a strong motivator.

Lock 'em Up
Thomas Sowell reminds us that nothing is more effective at reducing criminal activity than locking them up. Dr. Sowell is an expert in statistical analysis, and he points out the obvious: The higher the criminal incarceration rate, the lower the crime rate.  

This is too simple for liberals. Especially the ones rich enough to wall themselves off from the consequences of the dangerous stupidities they foist upon the rest of us.

Liberals Blowing Smoke and Breaking Windows

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, used a Wall Street Journal article to extol the virtues of carbon trading to her Wall Street constituents: 

According to financial experts, carbon permits could quickly become the
world's largest commodities market, growing to as much as $3 trillion
by 2020 from just over $100 billion today. With thousands of firms and
energy producers buying and selling permits to emit carbon, transaction
fees for exchanges and clearing alone could top nearly half a billion
dollars.

That $3 Trillion Will Come Out Of Our Pockets

What's good for Wall Street is bad for Main Street.  It takes carbon to heat our homes and bring consumer goods to the store. We will end up footing the bill for these transaction fees as businesses pass these Wall Street costs onto us in the form of higher light bills and rising retail prices. 



Liberals are Economically Ignorant

Gillibrand and her economically-ignorant fellow Democrats have fallen for the broken window fallacy.  Cap and Trade creates no new wealth.  Rather, it destroys wealtht through regulatory compliance costs and transaction fees.



About - Economics

WSJ - Gillibrand