“With the collapse of the Soviet Union, environmentalism has become the new refuge for the world’s displaced communists.” –Professor Limbaugh
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Alan Caruba, Canada Free Press: Environmentally, We’re Number One.
As we approach the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union…opps, I meant Earth Day…it’s so easy to confuse the two because they occur, quite by coincidence I’m sure, on the same day. Anyway April 22 will bring forth an avalanche of the usual accusations that America is a sinkhole of pollution, et cetera.
We are all supposed to feel guilty or angry or both for living in a nation that we are told is the largest “consumer” of, well, everything and, at the same time, a terrible steward of the land and such. There are two things that environmentalists hate, one is consumption and the other is the human beings doing it.
The only problem with these accusations is that they are, like virtually everything environmentalists tell us, wrong.
The Pacific Research Institute (PRI) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) just released the “2008 Index of Leading Environmental Indicators”, an annual report highlighting the significant environmental developments and milestones in the United States and worldwide.
As Steven F. Howard, a co-author of the Index and a PRI senior fellow, is pleased to note, “The U.S. remains the world’s environmental leader and will likely be so in the future.” For example, between 1997 and 2004, the last year in which comparative data are available, emissions from Kyoto Protocol participants increased 21.1 percent.
The U.S. refused to sign this United Nations inspired idiocy, but its emissions increased only 6.6 percent during the same time period, considerably less than the participants.
The Protocol is based on the lie that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are causing the Earth to warm, but the Earth is actually beginning to cool and CO2 constitutes a minuscule 0.038 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere…
As the Index points out, the United States last emitted CO2 at this level in 1910 when the population was only 92 million. All of which suggests that we are doing one hell of a better job at limiting GHG emissions than say, China or India. Oh, wait! They aren’t even Kyoto Protocol signatories. In fact, the Protocol exempts them. Which raises the question, if two of the world’s largest and fastest growing industrializing nations don’t have to limit GHG emissions, what’s the point of having a Protocol in the first place?
These days, crazed environmentals are calling for an 80 percent reduction of GHG by 2050. What they don’t tell you is that the only nations with emissions levels that low are appallingly poor. Don’t like GHG emissions? Move to Haiti or Somalia.
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Replacing the red, white and blue…
Business and Media Institute: Iwo Jima Veterans Blast Time’s ‘Special Environmental Issue’ Cover.
For only the second time in 85 years, Time magazine abandoned the traditional red border it uses on its cover. The occasion – to push more global warming alarmism.
The cover of the April 21 issue of Time took the famous Iwo Jima photograph by Joe Rosenthal of the Marines raising the American flag and replaced the flag with a tree. The cover story by Bryan Walsh calls green “the new red, white and blue.”
Donald Mates, an Iwo Jima veteran, told the Business & Media Institute on April 17 that using that photograph for that cause was a “disgrace.”
“It’s an absolute disgrace,” Mates said. “Whoever did it is going to hell. That’s a mortal sin. God forbid he runs into a Marine that was an Iwo Jima survivor.”
FrontPage Magazine: the Earth Day/Lenin connection.
Michelle Malkin: The Real Agenda of the Greenies.
Red State Rascals: The Environmentalists’ Quiet War on the Poor.
Donald Lambro at The Washington Times: Exposing A Blind Spot.
Sen. John McCain had one goal in mind when his turn came to question Gen. David Petraeus about the Iraq war: to show Sen. Barack Obama didn’t understand the dire threat al Qaeda posed to that country’s survival…
Though he never mentioned the Democratic presidential front-runner by name, Mr. McCain wanted to dismantle one of Mr. Obama’s chief contentions regarding the war: that there is no serious al Qaeda threat in Iraq in terms of a military infrastructure with command centers, bases, etc., and it is time to begin a full withdrawal of all combat forces there.
Mr. Obama has from the beginning maintained that al Qaeda was not in Iraq before the U.S. invasion and only entered the country after Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled. The Illinois senator’s argument essentially maintains that the U.S. presence in Iraq is the sole cause of the presence of al Qaeda in the country.
You would be unable to find any declaration in any of his campaign speeches that al Qaeda, the radical Islamic terrorist force that killed nearly 3,000 people in America on Sept. 11, 2001, and many other people in attacks around the world, poses a dire threat to Iraq’s fledgling democracy.
Indeed, if you visit Mr. Obama’s campaign Web site and look up his position paper on U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and scroll down to the very bottom of it, you will see a rather extraordinary statement. He asserts that if, after pulling most of our troops out of Iraq, al Qaeda were to establish bases there, he would go back in with strategic forces to eliminate them…
The cross-committee debate between the two rivals formed a study in sharp contrasts: On the one hand, Mr. McCain, focused on eliminating al Qaeda as a serious threat in Iraq; on the other, Mr. Obama, acknowledging al Qaeda’s presence as a force to be reckoned with, but willing to abandon the fight in any event.
HotAir: Iraqis Aren’t Stupid — And They’re Watching Us.
Powerline: The Consequences of Withdrawal.
Time reporter in Baghdad: “… every Iraqi who offers me a view on American politics seems to be praying for a McCain victory.”
Hamas endorses Barack Obama for President: “He has a vision to change America.”
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The quote in the cartoon is from the book The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City
by Ambassador Dore Gold.
“[P]assing the FairTax would constitute the biggest transfer of power from government to the people in the history of this republic.” –from the book FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics
by congressman John Linder and Neal Boortz, p.60.
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Sean Hannity:
“The FairTax is literally the single best idea for wealth creation and success that we have.”
Senator Zell Miller:
“The current income tax code requires massive files, dossiers, credits and collection activity by the IRS. Under the FairTax there is no IRS as the founding fathers intended. The current income tax pushes rates up and is biased against savings and investment. The FairTax would increase investments by U.S. citizens and attract foreign investment. The current income tax is an antiquated, unenforceable morass with annual tax returns long enough to circle the planet Earth twenty-eight times. Under the FairTax there are no forms for individuals. Not a single one.” –from Senator Miller’s book, A Deficit Of Decency
, p. 134.
Congressman Steve King:
“I have been for the FairTax for 27 years, long before the bill was conceived and more than $20 million in research was done. I like to say, ‘Every time I turn this Rubik’s Cube another way, it looks better and better and better.”
Congressman Tom Tancredo:
“[T]he most important reason to move from an income tax to a FairTax is because an income tax is designed to manipulate behavior. It gives the government the power to manipulate your behavior. ‘I reward you for the things I want you to do by giving you a tax cut. I penalize you for the things I don’t want you to do by raising your taxes.’ That is too much power for the federal government.”
Herman Cain (former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City):
“The FairTax moves us from a system that taxes what we earn to a system that taxes what we spend. Under the FairTax, you control your tax liability, not the government. The FairTax puts ‘we the people’ in charge of our money, and puts us all on the path to economic freedom!”
About the FairTax:
The FairTax Act (HR 25, S 1025) is nonpartisan legislation. It abolishes all federal personal and corporate income taxes, gift, estate, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare, and self-employment taxes and replaces them with one simple, visible, federal retail sales tax administered primarily by existing state sales tax authorities…
The FairTax:
- Enables workers to keep their entire paychecks
- Enables retirees to keep their entire pensions
- Refunds in advance the tax on purchases of basic necessities
- Allows American products to compete fairly
- Brings transparency and accountability to tax policy
- Ensures Social Security and Medicare funding
- Closes all loopholes and brings fairness to taxation
More:
Congressman John Linder’s FairTax site.
Take the FairTax Internet Seminar hosted by Neal Boortz.
Minneapolis Star Tribune: “Pink Slip Nation.”
WASHINGTON - It’s no longer a question of recession or not. Now it’s how deep and how long. Workers’ pink slips stacked ever higher in March as jittery employers slashed 80,000 jobs, the most in five years, and the national unemployment rate climbed to 5.1 percent. Job losses are nearing the staggering level of a quarter-million this year in just three months.
John Hinderaker at Powerline:
Do you remember 1996, when Bill Clinton swept to an easy re-election victory over Bob Dole, on the basis of what pretty much everyone in the press considered a near-perfect economy? No “pink slip nation” in 1996!
Actually, though, the unemployment rate in November 1996, when Clinton rode a soaring economy to victory, was 5.4%. That’s right–three tenths of a percent higher than the “grim picture” of a “pink slip nation” painted by this month’s unemployment report.
To be fair, the unemployment rate in November 1996, while higher than the current rate, was essentially flat, while March’s 5.1% unemployment represented an increase over the extraordinarily low rates that have characterized George Bush’s presidency. Still, it makes you wonder: is the current hysterical treatment of economic news the product of a rational evaluation of the data, or is it just one more sign of the media’s desire to put a Democrat in the White House in 2009?
Business Journal: Alan Greenspan endorses John McCain for president.
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And Michael Ramirez has won the Pulitzer Prize.
