The Army Of Climate Change Darkness Marches On

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by Smitty

Guilt by association is an ugly thing. So I disclaim at the outset any attempt to say that, merely because John Holdren,

the president’s current science czar — an advocate of de-developing America and population control.

has been a source of advice to Mitt Romney on “global warming and carbon emissions”. And the two should know:

Massachusetts is the first and only state to set CO2 emissions limits on power plants. The limits, which target the six largest and oldest power plants in the state, are the toughest in the nation…

Also interesting:

One of Romney’s former top state environmental officials during his tenure as Massachusetts governor now oversees air quality at Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, playing a key role in the march of environmental regulations to fight climate change and slash pollution from coal-fired power plants that is regularly blasted by Republicans seeking Obama’s job. Sometimes, even Romney himself.

I’d like to dub these climate change/carbon tax weenies the Army Of Climate Change Darkness, because:

  • they perpetuate this climate change myth in the face of scandal,
  • they pursue the kind of centralized market control that breeds failure wherever it goes, in this case, power failure,
  • they do seem an army invading our formerly capitalist country, and,
  • this blog still has not seen Bruce Campbell and Mitt Romney in the same place simultaneously.


Yeah, so what? Mitt is a smart guy. It may be that John Holdren does know something useful. Just because there is a bit of a professional tie there cannot be construed to mean that Holdren is a tool of the plutocrats and crony capitalists, and Mitt Romney is the anointed favorite who can be relied upon to ensure the correct wheels get greased. Why, that would be  a cheap shot, and this blog is far above such.

But wait! There’s more!

Washington, D.C., October 17, 2011 – The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request today with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), run by controversial White House Science Adviser (and former Mitt Romney climate adviser) John Holdren. The FOIA request seeks records involving an apparently co-ordinated effort between OSTP and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to subvert and circumvent U.S. law.

Specifically, CEI’s FOIA request seeks details of the Obama Administration’s involvement in a UN IPCC plan to hide official online correspondence in non-governmental accounts. The express purpose of creating a non-government web-site “cloud” communications system was to avoid national transparency laws, such as the U. S. FOIA. However, with OSTP having taken over the lead U.S. role in the IPCC in 2009, this also implicates the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (PRA).

The new IPCC system sought to shield U. S. government employees working on the Fifth Assessment Report from FOIA requests by hiding their correspondence, even though they are being tasked and paid by the federal government to work on the report. The scandal-plagued IPCC is funded with millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. CEI demonstrates in its FOIA request that the IPCC’s motivation to avoid future FOIA requests was past embarrassment over releases of earlier communications between IPCC officials and participating bureaucrats, appointees and scientists working on the assessment reports.

Read, as they say, the whole thing. At first blush, it doesn’t seem to pass the ‘So, what?’ test. However, given the U.N. non-command of doing anything useful, and the heretofore unbelievable hijinks of this administration, these guys are likely of everything under the sun except recognizing legitimate solar ventures. One assumes the worst and is rarely proven wrong.

And so what does that mean for the Mr. Squeaky Clean? Is it as bad as lauding Ted Kennedy when signing RomneyCare into law? Between the carbon tax, the RomneCare, and the seeming non-grasp of the fact that TeaPartiers are standing athwart the GOP yelling STOP, one sincerely hopes Somebody Arises Resurrecting American Hope.

They Truly Hate Liberty

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by Smitty

Ladd Ehlinger links Zilla of the Resistance in support of Donald Douglas, who has come under real-world attack for supporting the truth.

It is increasingly hard to give anyone on the Left the benefit of the doubt. On political questions, I am nearly at the point of thinking anyone on the Left is guilty until proven innocent. And even the evidence of innocence may be rigged. They campaign on transparency, then do precisely the opposite. Not acutely, but chronically, as though the truth were their urinal, and any semblance of classically liberal thought merely an act.

What to do?

First, I think we avoid being drawn solely into the moment. In the death throes of Progressivism, they are wildly wrecking as much as they can. Fools that they are, they live only in the present tense. Stay calm and adult. Remember that, after this societal kidney stone is passed, we still have to live with our actions. We that have a conscience and moral compass, that is. Expect the Left to lack such.

Second, don’t lose sight of compassion. There may be a tiny fraction of the Left that are salvageable. While dispensing 99% tough love to the 99% idiot crowd, keep the eye peeled for the 1% whose reasoning faculties are not totally shot.

Thirdly, don’t expect it to end soon. Progressivism may be dying, but, like some vast serpent in a Lovecraft story, it’s got significant thrashing to do. The Left wants you to give up and join the Cthulhu worship. Then there is the dirty diaper of debt that Progress leaves. It really isn’t clear to me that anyone knows just how bad things are, financially. Remember: they want you to despair. Resist we much.

Fourth, yawn at these appeals to foolish authority. The people that claim they can fix it are the people who have been tubing it for decades. If they sound stupid, or speak in contradictions (you have to tell your life story to fly, but can’t show government ID to vote) it is quite likely that they are stupid. Touching on #3 above, I frequently cite the Book of Exodus in the context of how long it is going to take to un-trash the American mind. These #OWS people are slaves, and they will beget slaves, but perhaps by the third generation we can again be a land of promise.

Foreign Policy and the Cult of Experts

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Daniel Drezner at Foreign Policy  mocks Herman Cain:

So I thought I’d go over to Cain’s campaign website and spend an equal amount of time to analyze his foreign policy thinking.
I found…. a total of five paragraphs on “national security.” That’s it. No white papers, fact sheets, bullet points, or list of advisors. So you gotta think that these are going to be the most awesome and mind-blowing foreign policy paragraphs ever!!!

Drezner is “professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University,” and his mocking commentary exemplifies a widespread attitude within the foreign policy/national security elite that expertise is essential in all such matters.

Turn back to 2008, however, and this insistence on national security expertise was nowhere to be seen, as John McCain — a man who had specialized in such matters even before being elected to Congress — was scorned in favor of the parvenu Barack Obama, whose only claim to foreign-policy expertise was having spent several years of his childhood in Indonesia.

Obviously, Cain expects the election to be fought over domestic economic issues, his own field of expertise, as a successful businessman. His occasional comments about foreign policy have not demonstrated a reassuring mastery of the subject, but one suspects he’s also losing points with the elite because he doesn’t talk the kind of talk that Obama talks. When Chris Buckley praised Obama’s “first-class temperament,” this was what he was praising: Having attended the right schools (Columbia and Harvard Law), Obama talks like . . . someone who attended the right schools.

Morehouse College and Purdue University graduate school, preparatory to a career in the food-service industry, do not impart the same sort of attitude as do Columbia and Harvard Law, preparatory to a career in academia and government.

Cain’s seeming indifference to expertise, his evident unwillingness to learn to talk the way politicians are supposed to talk about foreign policy, is what’s really being criticized here. But Cain may be smarter about this than his critics suspect. The grassroots voters are apt to think back over the past few years and wonder exactly what we’ve gained by listening to the soi-disant experts in foreign affairs. And so when Cain says wild stuff that sets the tongues of the punditry wagging, I’m not sure that’s going to cost him many votes in the Iowa precinct caucuses.

It may be no comfort to Daniel Drezner or Chris Buckley, but I hope David Brooks will be reassured to know that the creases of Herman Cain’s pants are always meticulously pressed. And if he ever needs to know anything about Vanuatu, I’m sure he’ll ask the expert.


Savage Weirdness at Final Boarding: Did Team Perry Put the Blame on Rubio?

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The National Affairs Desk, in the smoking lounge at
Dulles International Airport, 1:10 p.m., Monday, Oct. 17, 2011

DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
Less than hour until final boarding for my flight to LAX en route to Vegas, and no time to waste on trivia now. While I was checking in the one-way rental car ($164), I was on the phone with Sarah Rumpf, who told me a bizarre reverse-angle on the Rubio/Romney conspiracy theory. Pagan Temple had picked this out of Javier’s post earlier:

Convoluting matters further, one of Perry’s top campaign consultants was also Governor Charlie Crist’s consultant during the 2010 Senate race before Crist jumped ship and ran as an Independent, and that Perry’s Florida team was being led by Rich Heffley, Jim Rimes and Randy Enwright. Heffley was responsible for fabricating the infamous “truthaboutRubio” attack website against now Senator Rubio.

Get it? Sarah has a post about this that provides links to the dots – including Javier’s post from Friday – but leaves it to the reader to imagine how those dots might be connected. What am I getting at? Some of Rubio’s allies suspect that the Crist/LeMieux/Perry forces in Florida, eager to strike a blow against Romney, and also damage the hated Rubio, spread the rumor of a Romney/Rubio conspiracy to move up Florida’s primary to Jan. 31. By blaming it on Rubio’s chief of staff, Cesar Conda, they help LeMieux in next year’s Senate primary, because Rubio is also viewed as an ally of Adam Hasner.

Rubio has tried to stay officially neutral in both the presidential primary and the Florida Senate primary but – if this connect-the-dots theory is true – somebody in Team Perry managed to spread a damaging rumor in such a way that they must have known would reach me. Because I had solid sources telling me as first-hand knowledge that the Romney/Rubio conspiracy (with Conda as the middleman) was true. Were my sources duped? Or were they part of the Perry plot? Or is the original conspiracy theory true, and this new reverse-angle theory a defensive spin to protect Romney’s operation in Florida? The fact that Rich Heffley was one of the first Florida operatives hired by Team Perry suggests the possibility of dirty tricks, and by now the possibilities have multiplied so much I don’t know who or what to believe.

You see that we’re deep into savage weirdness at this point and, of course, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. But now I’ve got less than half an hour until they call final boarding, so I’ll have to leave all that for later, and finish with the Five Most Important Words in the English Language: Hit the freaking tip jar!
 





 

Fear and Loathing (and, Yes, Sweet Vengeance) On the Road to Feb. 1, 2012

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 Today’s the day I fly off to Las Vegas to cover Tuesday’s crucial Republican presidential debate. It’s a long flight from Dulles to LAX, then a four-hour layover before I catch the plane to Vegas. I’ll be crashing in Barbara Espinosa‘s suite at the Sands, while Smitty and Wombat — both of them got their media credentials for the debate — will fly in Tuesday.

But while I’ll be in Vegas the next four days to cover the debate and the Western Republican Leadership Conference, it’s important to remember that this isn’t about Vegas. This is about getting my revenge on those [insert obscene epithets] in the Florida GOP leadership who screwed up the campaign schedule, ruined Christmas and wrecked my life by moving their primary to Jan. 31.

And we know why they did it, don’t we? Continue reading Fear and Loathing (and, Yes, Sweet Vengeance) On the Road to Feb. 1, 2012 →