The environmental/judicial dictatorship has spoken:

In what is thought to be an unprecedented ruling, a Superior Court judge in Fulton County, Ga., halted the construction of a coal-fired power plant, saying that the plant must limit its emissions of carbon dioxide.

Citing an April 2007 US Supreme Court ruling that recognizes carbon dioxide – the primary gas responsible for global warming – as a pollutant under the federal Clean Air Act, Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore overturned a lower court’s decision to issue an air-pollution permit to Dynegy’s Longleaf power plant near Columbus, Ga. Her decision is believed to be the first one that links global warming to an air-pollution permit.

The case had been brought by the Sierra Club and Friends of the Chattahoochee, a local environmental group. They were represented by GreenLaw, an Atlanta-based public-interest law firm.

The coal-fired power plant – the first proposed in Georgia in 20 years – cannot begin construction until it can obtain a valid permit that complies with the court’s ruling.

The United States has the world’s largest supply of coal.  It accounts for 50% of our electrical production. The enviro’s are attempting to hold our coal supplies hostage along with our oil reserves. Even if we maximize “alternative” sources, we cannot meet growing demand for power without increases in coal production. Placing our energy economy in the hands of eco-tyrants and their judicial cohorts is a disaster waiting to happen.

Don’t let anyone tell you different: blogging is hard.  Even an opinionated and outspoken individual such as myself has difficulty finding material every day.  That task, however, is made a lot easier when one endeavors to cover the absurdities of the political left.

Be careful next time you’re pulling weeds in your garden, you may just be committing a war crime.  The Swiss government has issued a report on the moral rights claimed by plant life.  Here are some of their findings:

1. Arbitrariness:
The Committee members unanimously consider an arbitrary harm caused to plants to be morally impermissible. This kind of treatment would include, e.g. decapitation of wild flowers at the roadside without rational reason.

2. Instrumentalisation:
For the majority the complete instrumentalisation of plants – as a collective, as a species, or as individuals – requires moral justification.

3. Ownership of plants:
For the majority here too, plants – as a collective, as a species, or as individuals – are excluded for moral reasons from absolute ownership. By this interpretation no one may handle plants entirely according to his/her  own desires. A minority concludes that no limits apply to handling plants insofar as they are property.

Plants are people too!

I recently watched the remake of the classic sci-fi movie (and Michael Crichton book) The Andromeda Strain. It was rather remarkable how thoroughly the producers managed to litter the 4-hour (with commercials) mini-series with leftist propaganda. Almost no liberal talking point went unmentioned, regardless of how irrelevant to the plot the subject may have been. Iraq, wiretapping, don’t-ask-don’t-tell, port security and terrorist detentions all got prominent mentions, along with swipes at “greedy” corporations who dared to provide natural resources for consumption. Furthermore, the military is of course controlled by a cabal of secret organizations working in the shadows and conducting various nefarious activities that endanger all of humanity. Even low level foot soldiers don’t think twice when ordered to kill Americans without any explanation.

All of that pales in comparison to the overall plot, which found future human society unable to deal with a super-virus (which we are led to believe was probably created by future society as a biological weapon) thanks to the loss of certain bacteria found near deep-sea vents due to a new plan to “strip mine” the ocean floor.

For sci-fi fans, this should sound familiar. Star Trek IV, all but written by the Sierra Club, followed a similar plot where mankind faced extinction unless humpback whales could answer the call of a malevolent space probe. In 2008, instead of feeling guilty for our whale hunting ways, we’re supposed to go even further and mourn the loss of deep-sea bacteria. Even as liberal propaganda, this effort of The Andromeda Strain strained credibility.

In a dangerous partial-capitulation to socialists seeking a back-door through which to exert control over the U.S. economy, the Bush administration has chosen to list the polar bear on the threatened species list. The socialists were not satisfied, however, in the administration’s refusal to submit all economic activities to the oversight of a central environmental authority.

“Protecting the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act is a major step forward, but the Bush administration has proposed using loopholes in the law to allow the greatest threat to the polar bear — global warming pollution — to continue unabated,” Andrew Wetzler of the Natural Resources Defense Council said in a statement.

John Kostyack of the National Wildlife Federation, while gratified at the listing, saw little practical effect given the limits of Kempthorne’s regulations.

“By denying a direct link between the sources of global warming pollution and the loss of the polar bears’ sea ice habitat, and by denying that the polar bear will be protected from oil and gas development, they’re willing to sit by and let the polar bear go extinct,” Kostyack said by telephone.

…Bill Kovacs of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce praised the decision and its accompanying regulations, calling is a “common sense balancing” between environmental and business concerns.

Without the limiting regulations, Kovacs said, all carbon-emitters in the contiguous United States would have to go through a consultation process, which he said would have literally shut down federal activity overnight.

Of course, lost in this brouhaha is the fact that polar bears are not, as of yet, showing any signs that they are actually threatened:

The government of Nunavut, a territory that is home to most of Canada’s Inuit people and which manages or co-manages some 15,000 polar bears, expressed disappointment in the U.S. decision.

“It is unfortunate the (U.S. government) has decided to disregard facts collected by those who have the greatest contact and longest history with polar bears,” Nunavut Premier Paul Okalik said in a statement. “The truth is that polar bear populations are at near record levels.”

So long as the canard of global warming is bought so easily, it’s clear what is really threatened: freedom.

Democrats are frantic, yet again. This time they are all up in a fuss over the refusal of the administration to bow to their political games and place polar bears on the endangered species list, despite observed growth in some polar bear populations.

The call by special interests to place the polar bear on the endangered species list is not based on any evidence of declining polar bear populations. It is based on projections of future polar bear populations. That would be fine, if those projections were made through a rigorous scientific process. Sadly, they are based on sloppy methodologies and spurious assumptions:

Calls to list polar bears as a threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act are based on forecasts of substantial long-term declines in their population. Nine government reports were prepared to support the listing decision. We assessed these reports in light of evidence-based (scientific) forecasting principles. None referred to works on scientific forecasting methodology. Of the nine, Amstrup, Marcot and Douglas (2007) and Hunter et al. (2007) were the most relevant to the listing decision. Their forecasts were products of complex sets of assumptions. The first in both cases was the erroneous assumption that General Circulation Models provide valid forecasts of summer sea ice in the regions inhabited by polar bears. We nevertheless audited their conditional forecasts of what would happen to the polar bear population assuming, as the authors did, that the extent of summer sea ice would decrease substantially over the coming decades. We found that Amstrup et al. properly applied only 15% of relevant forecasting principles and Hunter et al. only 10%. We believe that their forecasts are unscientific and should therefore be of no consequence to decision makers. We recommend that all relevant principles be properly applied when important public policy decisions depend on accurate forecasts.

The report goes on to list the numerous scientific principles these reports violated. Contrary to the claims of the global warming fanatics, this process is not being driven by science. The call to put polar bears on the endangered species list is nothing more than an attempt to, in the minds of liberals, validate their belief in global warming. If they can’t prove a phenomenon is real, they just react to it as if it is real and then use their own reactions as proof of its existence. “Of course there’s global warming,” they’ll say in the near future, “its effects have put polar bears on the endangered species list!” Enough is enough of the polar bear politics.

As we enter the new year it’s important to remember that world stability, economic prosperity, and freedom will again be threatened not by one, but by two separate fascist movements. Global Jihad has as its express goal the subjugation of the world, the waging of jihad to bring that part of the world known as Dar al-Harb (house of war) into Dar al-Islam (house of Islam). At present, this battle is being fought in North Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, Western Europe, and North America. No one is immune. Jihadists make no distinctions between combatant and non-combatant, only Muslim and non-Muslim, or more often just jihadist and non-jihadist.

The Global Jihad movement, spurred on by the rapid spread of Wahhabi Islam, has been steadily coalescing for decades. It is not cooling down and will not relent in 2008. Years of propaganda and indoctrination are paying off as jihadists flock to the battle grounds in Iraq and Sudan, drawn into conflict not by local geo-politics but by a true belief in a world-hungry ideology.

The ends have overwhelmed the means and truth is the casualty.

The other fascist threat facing the world shares a number of characteristics with that of Global Jihad, including the religious-like devotion of its adherents. From Kyoto to Bali, an Ivy Curtain has descended across the globe. Behind that curtain lies economic disaster and slavery. The specter of global warming has become an all-purpose boogeyman, just as Jews and the West are blamed for all Muslim maladies Blamed for everything from droughts to floods, global warming is now the climatic catch-all. Arctic ice decreases or increases? Both global warming. Local temperatures rise or fall? Both global warming. Hurricane activity increases or decreases? Both global warming. The global warming shamans have so successfully indoctrinated their faithful that any climatic change, in a system that is by definition chaotic, is proof of global warming.

In order to sustain their faith in the face of ever mounting counter-evidence, the global warming zealots have decimated the scientific process. Political intimidation now substitutes for rigorous debate. The ends have overwhelmed the means and truth is the casualty. Like the jihadists, these eco-cultists have also turned to child indoctrination to ensure the long-term survival of their faith.

Having identified the world’s boogeyman, the global warming high priests are now prepared to ride to the rescue and grant us salvation. All we have to do is turn over control of our lives. There is a way to fight off this great global warming scourge, they tell us, and freedom is the price. H.L. Mencken once said, “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.” The global warming zealots offer bigger government both domestically and internationally (at the expense of sovereignty) as the only means of salvations. “It is up to enlightened intellectuals to save us from ourselves,” they say, “and, oh, those intellectuals just happen to be us.”

Both of these fascist movements will rely on us to destroy ourselves if they are to achieve their objectives. In both cases it will take domestic converts willing to work from within to bring us down. Propaganda and indoctrination are the tools that will be used, and sorting fact from fiction will be more difficult than ever. But if we remember the values we stand for, freedom and self-determination, we can make 2008 the year these fascists were turned back at the gates.

Very convenient for liberals that the solution to global warming always seems to be…liberalism. More taxes, more government, less individual freedom, wealth redistribution, worldwide government, more market regulation, etc. If I didn’t know better, I’d say climate change was just a ploy to advance the left’s agenda.

Dealing with global warming will be painful, says one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress. To back up his claim he is proposing a recipe many people won’t like _ a 50-cent gasoline tax, a carbon tax and scaling back tax breaks for some home owners.

“I’m trying to have everybody understand that this is going to cost and that it’s going to have a measure of pain that you’re not going to like,” Rep. John Dingell, who is marking his 52nd year in Congress, said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press.

Dingell will offer a “discussion draft” outlining his tax proposals on Thursday, the same day that President Bush holds a two-day conference to discuss voluntary efforts to combat climate change.

But Dingell, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that will craft climate legislation, is making it clear that he believes tackling global warming will require a lot more if it is to be taken seriously.

Voluntary, shmoluntary. Don’t you plebes worry about a thing. Just leave it to us bureaucrats.

“This is going to cause pain,” he said, adding that he wants to make certain “the pain is shared in a way that is fair, proper, acceptable and accomplishes the basic purpose” of reducing greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.

This is going to hurt, but it’s for your own good.

Remember, in the liberal dictionary, fair means it hurts productive citizens the most whilst sparing the bumps-on-logs.

You will not enjoy this, This will not be over quickly, I am not your elected representative.

Wall Street continues to back off as a global credit crunch looms and the U.S. housing market seems poised to go into freefall. Part of the problem is too many people buying too much house - living too large for their income. At my workplace, we sometimes refer to these as 40k millionaires. An entry level 20 something, ink still hasn’t dried on his bachelors degree, and already has a house payment, BMW lease and living expenses adding up to more than his $40k yearly income. If some blindsiding event occurs, be it a pregnancy or loss of job, there is no flexibility in the 40ker’s finances and it all comes crashing down. Thus he begins his adult life with a bankruptcy. Shame on them. Double shame on the lenders.

There is also a flip side to this coin. The people who have little choice but to buy more house than they can afford and to live on a razor sharp budget. These people also run the risk of default and foreclosure. Maybe it’s a family that must live in an urban area to be close to the father’s work. Living somewhere cheaper might not be an option, as commuting can be expensive and jobs can be hard to come by. Anyone who’s lived in a large city knows just how ridiculously expensive it can be when there’s too much demand for housing and not enough supply. But what can these people really do? They’ve got to live somewhere.

The tragedy is that the problem of soaring real estate costs in urban areas is worse than it needs to be, and as you might be able to guess, government interference in the marketplace is at least partly to blame. Matt Woolsey at Forbes reports on the state of the housing market.

Los Angeles is sometimes called the “Sultan of Sprawl.” But you wouldn’t know it by looking at the country’s fastest-growing suburbs. Not a single one falls in the L.A. metropolitan area.

Instead, Angelenos are packing their bags and heading 60 miles east to San Bernardino, where 12 of the country’s 100 fastest-growing suburbs are located(…)

It’s easy to understand why. Home prices in the Riverside-San Bernardino metropolitan area are 30% less expensive than in L.A., and household incomes are comparable.

The move from basin to valley makes enough sense that San Bernardino’s rate of net domestic migration has near quadrupled since 1990, while the Los Angeles metro area posted negative net migration figures over that same period. Last year, it lost 72,000 more residents than it gained.

Some of this may be due to jobs moving out of L.A. because of the escalating state and local taxes required to feed the blob. As the productive citizens and wealth generating businesses continue to abandon ship, no doubt the ones who stay behind will face ever increasing tax burdens to maintain the desired level of welfare benefits. It’s also cheaper to live elsewhere because restrictive development policies jack up the cost of housing.

Texas has the lion’s share of the country’s 100 top-growth suburbs, with 20. (Twelve of these are in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area.) That’s partly because geographic growth is almost completely unregulated in the Lone Star state. Sprawl has its pros and cons. These areas have some of the most affordable homes in the nation, because there is plenty of supply to meet demand. But transportation expenses are often high.

What a concept. When left alone the free market provides people what they demand at prices they can afford.

But progressives in government see right through this capitalism nonsense. They understand that real estate development is the rape of the natural world. And it is therefore their duty as a citizen of the planet earth to pass laws stopping evil men from building cheap houses for people to raise families in. Like Wile E. Coyote their plans predictably backfire.

Cities that engage in restrictive growth policies find themselves with different trade-offs. In Boston’s inner suburbs, including Chelsea and Cambridge, zoning and growth restrictions designed to prevent sprawl instead force people to look farther outside the city for affordable housing. According to the same Brookings Institution study, metro areas with growth-exclusion plans have the most expensive housing in the country, because there is a limited supply of homes close to the city.

Last year, about 16,000 more people left the Boston metro area than moved in, and the suburbs continued to expand geographically. The result is a thinning of the area. If sprawl is defined as the density of population over a geographic space, that makes Boston more of a sprawl than places such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, which are spreading out faster but with a more concentrated population.

Adding insult to injury, Ryan Balis at the National Center for Public Policy Research explains how these ill-conceived utopian policies end up hurting the poor and minorities the worst.

Environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and NIMBY suburbanites support these policies because they want to protect open space.6 They claim that concentrating people together through restrictive urban growth boundaries encourages mass transit use, reduces automobile dependence, cuts air pollution and preserves the “aesthetic and natural assets of communities.”7

But smart growth development restrictions pose a distinct problem for regions experiencing population growth. The overall shortage of housing can create affordability and quality of life problems for families entering the housing market, particularly those with low and moderate incomes and upwardly mobile minorities.

The problem is largely overlooked but could have far-reaching consequences. According to an econometric report commissioned by The National Center for Public Policy Research, one million households who bought homes between 1992 and 2002 would not have been able to do so had smart growth policies such as those found in Portland, Oregon been extended nationwide. Smart growth proponents consider Portland’s policies a model for other metropolitan areas. Of this displaced group, a disproportionate number - 260,000 - would have been black.

Those not belonging to the cult of man-made global warming should be put to death, according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Get rid of all these rotten politicians that we have in Washington, who are nothing more than corporate toadies,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist author, president of Waterkeeper Alliance and Robert F. Kennedy’s son, who grew hoarse from shouting. “This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors.”

The penalty for treason is death. Robert Kennedy Jr. is thus, in calling for treating them as traitors, advocating death for his policy opponents. Will we see any media outrage? Doubtful, as the author of this particular fluff piece found the comment unworthy of further consideration.

What I want to know is: When will the rabid left stop questioning the patriotism of those with whom they disagree?

If republicans are pushing an issue, I’d bet any amount that the left will at some point or another attempt to link that position with environmental damage. It’s a standard in their old, worn-out playbook.

Imagine an area the size of the state of Rhode Island with only one wagon track crossing its vast emptiness, a 860,000 acre wildlife refuge in Arizona’s Sonoran desert along the Mexican border that comprises 56 miles of what the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service calls the “loneliest international boundary in the continent.” In fact, you’ll have to imagine it, because while that description of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge still appears on its web site, there are now 1,200 miles of illegal roads and footpaths created by drug smugglers and illegal immigrants scarring the refuge.

Right off the bat we see blame being miscast, as it’s the illegal aliens destroying this precious environment by…walking all over it! Nevertheless, there is serious concern over the dastardly republican plans to use fences!

Cabeza Prieta is just one part of the 2,000 mile-long border that conservationists are increasingly worried about. While politicians of all stripes focus on the human side of the noisy immigration debate, there is a rising concern over what illegal immigration and the U.S. response to it may do to the area’s fragile ecosystems. The $7.6 billion federal Secure Border Initiative passed last year calls for the construction of 370 miles of pedestrian fence along the border by 2008 ? 129 miles in Arizona, 153 in Texas, 76 in California and 12 in New Mexico. Pedestrian fences have so far proved useful in inhibiting human traffic, but conservationists and others worry they limit access to the habitat for endangered species such as jaguars and the antelope-like Sonoran Desert pronghorn.

Well of course they worry, it’s what the left does. They are professional worriers. I can’t quite figure out how this article got titled, though. It seems to me the main focus is on the negative impact of illegal immigrants. Security measures are also themselves simply a response to their trespasses. Yet the headline blames security, rather than what is causing that need for security. Same media crap, different day.