Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel are lawyers in the Environmental Protection Agency’s San Francisco office. They are also married to each other. Williams and Zabel are Global Warming “true believers”. They’ve done the research, and they think the Waxman-Markey-Boxer-Kerry Cap and Trade scheme is a very bad idea.
So they wrote a position paper for the website www.carbonfees.org. They wrote an editorial that was published in The Washington Post.
And they made the following video:
When I was a kid (mid- to late-’60s), nightly TV news shows were everyone’s source of information. Alongside from the flickering bland-and-white coverage of the Vietnam war and protesting hippies, I distinctly remember stories that would be foreign to us in 2009: food prices.
Yes, food prices. Right there in the segment where today you’d expect to see updates on gasoline prices, you’d have David Brinkley or Walter Cronkite or Howard K. Smith used to report on the prices of beef, chicken, bread, milk or eggs.
Food was dear back then. About 1972, Big Government changed that, and thereby sewed the seeds of today’s “Health Care Crisis”. Let’s connect the dots.
In a precedent-setting ruling, a judge in the UK upholds Mr Tim Nicholson’s right to sue his former employer because he was fired over his environmental beliefs and his green lifestyle.
Climate change belief given same legal status as religion
In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton said that “a belief in man-made climate change … is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations”.
The ruling could open the door for employees to sue their companies for failing to account for their green lifestyles, such as providing recycling facilities or offering low-carbon travel.
State investigators taking dozens of computers from ACORN office on Canal Street
Early last month, Caldwell’s office issued subpoenas for records from ACORN’s New Orleans office, where the organization — now moving its national headquarters to Washington — has long been based. …
In a statement, ACORN’s attorney Pamela Marple said the group was told the raid was ordered because of reports that workers loyal to Beth Butler, the recently fired head of ACORN’s Louisiana branch, had been taking computer data and other items out of the office.
“Over the last two months, ACORN has been cooperating with a variety of governmental entities across the country to provide requested information and documents,” Marple wrote. “We were told that the AG’s office has no criticisms of ACORN’s cooperative efforts, but rather that the warrant was issued because of concern that former local ACORN staff members had, and may intend in the future to remove or alter electronic documents.”
An ACORN official also said Caldwell’s investigators will copy the hard drives from ACORN’s computers and return them next week. The computers contain all payroll information for the national organization, the official said.
H/T dennism
Friday night, prosecutors in the case of The United States v. William Jefferson (D-LA) issued a memorandum recommending a prison sentence of 27 to 33 years for the former congressman from New Orleans, consistent with Federal sentencing guidelines. Such a long sentence is justified, according to the memo, by the severity of the crimes, flight risk, and the possibility of hidden assets.
Anything approaching the recommended punishment would be the longest sentence ever meted out on given to a U.S. Congressman.
Jefferson will be sentenced on November 13 by Federal Judge T.S. Ellis III in Alexandria, VA.
One of the stranger episodes in corporate marketing history occurred in 1985 when the Coca-Cola Corporation decided to alter the secret formula of its flagship product.
Maybe Republican Party leaders could stand a review.
We often fall into the trap of acting on emotions, not facts. It certainly makes us feel good to feel like we’re doing something positive. But being a grownup requires discipline, common sense and thinking instead of feeling. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our approach to energy and environmental policy.
One example: the “eat local” movement seems to be getting some traction among concerned urban types. The premise: It must be a horrendous waste, in this post oil-peak world, to transport your strawberries by jet from New Zealand and your haricots-verts and arugula from California, when you can get them at the quaint little Farmer’s Market or a funky co-op in town. Furthermore, industrial farming is not only bad, but doomed by the shortage of energy [link]:
The age of the 3000-mile-caesar salad will soon be over. Food production based on massive petroleum inputs, on intensive irrigation, on gigantic factory farms in just a few parts of the nation, and dependent on cheap trucking will not continue. We will have to produce at least some of our food closer to home.
Not so fast, according to the blog “Peak Oil Debunked”.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is under attack by some of its members for its opposition to the Cap and Trade bill. The Natural Resources Defense Council, through its blogs and through the website whodoesthechamberrepresent.org maintains a running watch on those altruistic companies who have either quit the Chamber or publicly disputed its Climate Change position.
To the NRDC, companies that stick with the Chamber’s anti-Cap and Trade position are motivated strictly by greed, whereas the companies listed above are driven by the purest of altruism.
U.S. CHAMBER CLIMATE CREDIBILITY CRISIS COUNTER:
Quit the U.S. Chamber over climate: Apple, Exelon, PNM Resources, PG&E, PSEG, Levi Strauss & Co, San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, Mohawk Paper.
Quit the U.S. Chamber Board over climate: Nike.
Refused to join the U.S. Chamber over climate: NRG Energy.
Companies that say the U.S. Chamber doesn’t represent their views on climate: Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, Alcoa, Duke, Entergy, Microsoft, Toyota, Royal Dutch Shell, Seventh Generation, Dow, PEPCO, Cisco Systems …
Altruistic? Ehhhhh. Let’s follow the money.
On Sunday, we learned that one of the best things we can do for Mother Gaia is to keep the sizes of our families at a minimum. In the final analysis, a human being is nothing more than a CO2 generator on legs.
Today’s lesson in Saving the Planet comes from Britain, where the Lord High Poo-Bah of Climate Change, Lord Stern of Brentford, has declared:
“Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”
Save the Planet. Eat your arugula.
Washington (CNSNews.com) – Andrew Revkin, who reports on environmental issues for The New York Times, floated an idea last week for combating global warming: Give carbon credits to couples that limit themselves to having one child.
Revkin later told CNSNews.com that he was not endorsing the idea, just trying to provoke some thinking on the topic.
Revkin calls it a “thought experiment”.
Well, isn’t that special.
At first blush, this story from the Washington Post is pretty funny: a “green energy” firm’s wind farm project in West Virginia is being challenged under the Endangered Species Act by some local tree bat huggers.
Tiny bat pits green against green
It is the first court challenge to wind power under the Endangered Species Act, lawyers on both sides say. … At the heart of the Beech Ridge case is the Indiana bat, a brownish-gray creature that weighs about as much as three pennies and, wings outstretched, measures about eight inches. A 2005 estimate concluded that there were 457,000 of them, half the number in 1967, when they were first listed as endangered.
Go ahead. Enjoy a moment of schadenfreude.
New Orleans’ Democrat Mayor Ray Nagin can see the advantages of a country like Cuba, when it comes to hurricane preparedness and evacuation. Cuba, you see, was hit by Hurricanes Gustav, Ike and Paloma last year and suffered only seven fatalities. Nagin is in Cuba with a trade delegation from the Crescent City for a five-day visit.
“I think they do a much better job than we do on knowing their citizens at a very, very detailed level, block by block, ” Nagin said.
In Cuba, Revolutionary Defense Committees on nearly every corner watch their neighbors. They help with evacuations and provide social services such as vaccinations, but also are supposed to report any behavior considered subversive.
Right, Ray. Just think of those Revolutionary Defense Committee persons as nosy Community Organizers, who are just there in the community, close to the people, to help out with hygeine. Politcal hygiene, in particular.
To a capitalist, the words “It’s different this time” are a notorious red flag.
They’re usually uttered in the midst of a speculative boom, to explain why this boom is different from the last one that went disastrously bust.
In a market driven by capitalist rules (supply & demand, creative destruction), they’re nearly always wrong.
But in a centrally-planned system, where the government picks winners and losers, where dinosaur businesses are too big to fail, where investment in capital-wasting non-economic ventures (read: “green jobs”) is actually encouraged, where labor unions are exalted and private property trod upon, where the government is expected to be the engine that drives job growth, and where John Maynard Keynes has been restored from the economic dustbin of history to be beatified, economic stagnation and high unemployment are to be expected.
Just ask any fiscal conservative.
A couple of weeks ago, on a Sunday night/Monday morning, a poll at the social networking site Facebook asked the question: “Should Obama Be Killed?” Here’s a screenshot:
As soon as the objectionable poll was noticed, the site’s management pulled it down. (Actually, they disabled the poll application. DailyKos poster Vann has a diary up at that site; seems he was the app’s developer.) The Secret Service quickly determined that the perpetrator was a kid of unspecified name & age: “There was no intent on the part of this juvenile,” FBI Agent Ed Donovan said. “We’re just characterizing it as a mistake.”
Now, take another look at the screenshot.
Over the weekend, an unpaid ACORN volunteer in New Orleans expressed her desire to see a little more evidence of the Hope’n'Change she voted for when President Obama visits the city, however briefly, on Thursday.
Since it’s hard to fire an unpaid volunteer, the Big Wigs from HQ showed up on Tuesday and sacked Beth Butler, longtime executive director of Louisiana ACORN.
But there might be more to the story. Pass the popcorn.
There’s quite a remarkable story in today’s New Orleans Times-Picayune. I wish I could cut and paste it in its entirety.
It’s the story of two very different men that we chose to lead our country, and how, in the unlikely setting of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, we have a chance to compare and contrast their characters.
The world knows one as a blue-blooded faux Texan, bumbling idiot, spoiled child of privilege and draft dodger. The other is a compassionate man of the people who will soon join Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer and Nelson Mandela in the Pantheon of recipients of the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Amazing.
When you’re rich, really eight-figure inherited/married wealth rich, a recession means you might opt for the pre-owned Gulfstream IV over the new. If only to let the little people know that you feel their pain.
When you’re poor, bad times threaten your job, your family, your health, or your life. Bad times hurt people at the margins.
The liberal ruling class displays an astonishingly callous disregard of the human cost of bad economic times on the huddled masses whose interests they claim to safeguard.
But even the most clueless patrician among our elected elite would never suggest that a recession is a good thing.
Would he?
The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that LA Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, a Democrat, is on ACORN, as we say, like gravy on rice.
ACORN embezzlement was $5 million, La. attorney general says
The organization, until recently headquartered in New Orleans, had tried to keep the details of an embezzlement quiet. The embezzler, Dale Rathke, was the one-time bookkeeper for the organization. His brother, Wade Rathke, was President of ACORN International at the time, and saw to it that the unpleasantness was handled when he and “a donor” repaid $1 million of Dale’s improper credit card charges.
Now, however, AG Caldwell is following up on an ACORN internal report that the embezzlement was closer to $5 million.
Attorney General Buddy Caldwell has been conducting an investigation of ACORN since June. He issued subpoenas in August seeking documents related to former ACORN International President Wade Rathke and his brother Dale Rathke, who kept the group’s books. Those subpoenas were focused on possible ACORN violations for non-payment of employee withholding taxes, obstructing justice and violating the Employee Retirement Security Act. No charges have been made. …
“Current high-ranking members of ACORN have publicly acknowledged that embezzlement did in fact occur, but the exact amount of the embezzlement was unknown until it was recently acknowledged in a board of directors meeting on Oct. 17, 2008, by Bertha Lewis and Liz Wolf that an internal review had determined that the amount embezzled was $5 million, ” the new subpoena says.
The subpoena says, “It is still unclear if some of the monies embezzled are from state, federal or private funds.”
Michael Moore proclaims “Capitalism did nothing for me.”
You’re wrong, Michael. Dead wrong. Capitalism has done plenty for you, sport.
H/T cnsnews via the Drudge Report
For your Saturday morning viewing enjoyment…
The first clip is Stewart’s take on Dem fundraiser Hassan Nemazee, with the money quote from Joe Biden (“If I had my way, we’d be calling him Ambassador Nemazee”):
Then we have a free-wheeling interview with former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, which made me wonder, “Why won’t they release the tapes?”:
