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he Dems dream of a vast new IRS is still alive even as Congressional Dems back off from Obama’s concept – cap and trade as a tax – in favor of a seemingly less onorous cap and trade as a grant concept. But that darn Congressional Budget Office just keeps on pointing out the obvious: No matter how its structured, cap and trade will be an economic Katrina on the American economy.

The CBO has issued a second letter opining on the Dem scheme, WashTimes reports:

Congress’ chief scorekeeper says the global warming bill moving through Congress will either be scored as a major tax increase or a massive expansion of the federal government – and either one could give opponents substantial ammunition to complicate Democrats’ efforts to pass a bill.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), in a letter sent last week to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman, said Democrats’ approach of creating allowances for emitting greenhouse gases requires developing from scratch a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars. …

The six-page CBO letter also listed repeated examples of situations in which, for purposes of the federal budget, it will assume that the cap-and-trade approaches will dampen businesses’ income, meaning less revenue to the federal government.

The Dem response?  Well, they’re trying to work with CBO.  They figure that maybe if they threaten the CBO budget or start making personal attacks on its staff, they’ll be able to get the watchdogs to change a couple assumptions and come out with a rosier report. In other words, they’re not looking at the bill, seeing it for what it is and deciding to wait until the economy is back on its feet to cut its legs out from under it.  Instead, they remain intent on kicking the economy while its down and want to get fudged numbers to excuse their action.

Meanwhile, the environmental lobbying machine is busy discounting the CBO:

Dan Lashof, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate center, said the CBO will still have to issue a final score on the bill when it passes the committee, and NRDC hopes the letter is not the last word.

“What they have left out of their analysis is the benefit to consumers of energy efficiency – that actually lowers their bills. I don’t see anywhere in this long set of examples this accounts for that,” Mr. Lashof said.

That’s because the CBO hasn’t yet come up with the metrics to measure pipe dreams and fantasies.  There is no energy efficient replacement immediately available that would allow us to avoid the immediate impacts of cap and trade. As one commenter to the WashTimes story sarcastically put the Dem view of things,

The CBO is full of partisan hacks who want to do nothing more than destroy this once great nation. But, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate center is a straight down the middle lovable group who would never do anything that might tear apart the very foundations of our economy.

The new bill gives the GOP and blue dog Dems some hope that cap and trade might be the first Obama policy initiative to fall flat on its face.  That certainly must be the goal, both to protect the economy from Warmie lunacy and to signal an end to the devastating run Obama’s enjoyed.

Do your part. Write your member of Congress and demand they tell you before they vote how the bill will impact your power bill and the price at the pump.  Keep asking; hold them to it.

Art: The Talk of the Times 

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he taxpayer revolution has begun. With 11 percent of precincts reporting, Sac Bee says Californians are rejected propositions 1A through 1E by overwhelming margins, with the best of ‘em barely able to break the 40 percent mark.

It’s like we gassed the state legislator with ourselves in the room. There’s going to be some hurt because of the way we voted today, but that’s OK. Sometimes it’s just more important to send a message, and today we sent it: The long-running Sacramento show Dems Gone Wild has got to stop, with all its over-spending and over-intrusiveness.

The final measure, 1F, that won’t let the legislator pay itself until it passes a balanced budget, is winning big time.

Message sent.

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Before immersing myself for the day in water policy at the Association of California Water Agencies spring conference, I sent out three quick tweets this morning about Obama’s new 39 mpg mileage goal for America’s car fleet.  (That’s the prez dancing with Ford CEO Alan Mulally at the announcement, BTW.)

The first:

Someone remind me: Why is it so urgent to have 35 mpg cars if Obama can charm OPEC into loving America?

One of the primary reasons to increase the efficiency of the fleet is national security. The more efficient our cars, the less oil we will have to import. Obama’s considerable (and likely unsuccessful) efforts to win the hearts of the Muslim world notwithstanding, he can hardly tout national security as a reason for his decision to insanely dramatically up the mpg target.

If he were concerned about national security, he wouldn’t be opposed to the exploitation of our domestic oil resources, but his positions on drilling, cagey as they are, are just Obamaspeak for “Just say no to drillin.”  And besides, if he were concerned about national security, he wouldn’t be closing Guantanamo, forcing a withdrawal deadline on our military leaders in Iraq, releasing the mastermind of the Cole bombing, or divulging interrogation memos.

The second:

Someone remind me: Why do we have to give up safety for 35 mpg? Will more greivous injuries make it easier for BHO to get nat’l healthcare?

Hybrids and diesels are going to be an increasing part of the mix, but we’re not going to hit 35 mpg without removing a whole lot of protective armor from our cars. Perhaps the fact that cars will become slower and more boring will offset the spike in mortality rates that will result from the flimisification of America’s fleet, but I doubt it.  People drove Model T’s too fast.

So our morgues will get more bodies, but so will our emergency rooms – broken, but still breathing.  Put together these mileage standards with Obama’s healthcare fantasies, and you will have a very expensive healthcare system indeed.

The third:

Someone remind me: Why is it so urgent to have 35 mpg cars if you can’t quantify an improvement to the climate as a result?

The Obamites have no intention of telling the American people the truth about this.  Oh, they can conjure up tons of greenhouse gas that will be removed from the atmosphere by today’s announcement (and feel free to believe the number if you’re silly enough to choose to), but even if the numbers are right, their impact, if any, on climate change simply can’t be known.  So, Obama decided to expel about a billion tons of carbon dioxide instead:

Think about this. Consider how much has changed all around us. Think of how much faster our computers have become. Think about how much more productive our workers are. Think about how everything has been transformed by our capacity to see the world as it is, but also to imagine a world as it could be.

That’s what’s been missing in this debate for too long, and that’s why this announcement is so important, for it represents not only a change in policy in Washington but the harbinger of a change in the way business is done in Washington. No longer will we accept the notion that our politics are too small, our nation too divided, our people too weary of broken promises and lost opportunities to take up a historic calling. No longer will we accept anything less than a common effort, made in good faith, to solve our toughest problems.

And that is what this agreement seeks to achieve.

Good gosh. You’d think he was announcing a whole new constitution or something, not just a kicking up of mileage standards. Here’s a rule of thumb that will come in handy for the next three and a half years (hopefully no longer): The higher the rhetoric soars, the lower to set your expectations.

What was left unsaid was this:  Now that Obama is de facto CEO of Chrysler and GM, they couldn’t fight him on these goals, and without Chrysler and GM, Ford’s hands were tied as well. Obama’s purchase of the automotive sector with our hard-earned money has changed the balance of power.  Call it a common commitment to fighting climate change if you wish, but it’s really just more evidence of the sweeping scale of Obama’s executive coup.

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uropeans must be a happy bunch this morning because a team of Russian and American “experts” have determined that their continent needs no missile shield, and those apocalyptic Iranians and their full-bore nuclear development programs pose no risk to Europeans from Budapest to Bath.

The experts’ first finding, reported by WaPo is that the planned defense won’t be effective against the type of missiles the Iranians are likely to use. The second: It’ll be more than five years before the Iranians would be read to nuke Europe.  Two questions:  How long will it take to install the missile defense.  And why not hire some other experts to use those five years to make the system effective against the kind of missiles the Iranians would use.

The experts then analyzed the Iranians’ crappy missiles, derived from crappy North Korean knock-offs of seriously outdated Russian sub-launched missiles, and conclude it would take six to eight years for the Iranians to get a launchable bomb and put it on a missile capable of hitting a European city.  So no missile defense is needed, natch!  Especially since the experts don’t think any U.S. system could knock out an Iranian – North Korean – Russian missile dating from the 1950s.

But the entire discussion is moot because of the experts’ final point: that the Iranians won’t nuke Europe anyway because it will ensure their self-destruction.  How odd.  Saner nations than Iran - the US and Russia – pursued or feared missile defense systems, even though the doctrine of mutually assured destruction was firmly in place between them, so why should the Europeans not have an insurance policy against Iranian lunacy?

I don’t think the Iranians are likely to try to hit Europe with a missile because so many other scenarios make more sense, not the least of which is simply providing a nuclear umbrella for its operatives in the Middle East.  But if I were a European, I’d be more comfortable staking my future on a real missile defense than the opinions of experts.

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How ironic that Obama’s new head of the Centers for Disease Control has the word “fried” in his name, because Thomas Frieden is the nation’s most effective crusader against our rights to order tasty fried food.

Jacob Sullum at Reason tells us Frieden told the Financial Times in 2006 that “when anyone dies at an early age from a preventable cause in New York City, it’s my fault.”  That sense of being a health super-hero explains Frieden’s accomplishments as New York’s  health commissioner:  a smoking ban, heavy cigarette taxes, a trans fat ban, and mandatory calorie counts on restaurant menu boards.
So what’s the big deal if the CDC goes from fighting infectuous diseases to focusing on nanny state intervention into our  personal habits?  What harm could Obama’s new appointment do?  Sullum explains, sharing this from the NYT:

Dr. Alfred Sommer, emeritus dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who was on the team that recommended Dr. Frieden as New York’s health chief in 2002, recalled interviewing him shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. Dr. Frieden had flown to New York from India, where he was living and working on tuberculosis control.

Before he left India, he was asked about his top priority, Dr. Sommer said. “Oh, well, that’s easy, Al,” Dr. Sommer recalled him replying. “Tobacco. Tobacco is killing more people, and that’s my top priority.”

“Tom, I don’t disagree that tobacco is a real scourge, but have you heard of 9/11?” Dr. Sommer said he countered.

“Of course I know about that, but bioterrorists are not going to kill more New Yorkers than tobacco is,” Dr. Frieden said.

That’s an insensitivity of a Ward Churchill magnitude mixed with an agenda as activist as Billy Ayres’ 1970s task list.  And he’s the guy Obama tapped to head up the CDC.  Stunning.

David Boaz at Cato looks at Frieden’s crazed sense of personal responsibility for the health of all New Yorkers and sees an appointment in the mold of all Obama’s senior administrator appointments.  As you read this quote, adapt it a bit and see how well it fits his appointments to EPA, NHTSA and other high-interface agencies:

That’s a breathtaking vision of the scope and power of government. If you eat butter or salt, or smoke, or climb mountains, or ride a motorcycle, or bungee-jump, or run with the bulls in Pamplona, Dr. Frieden feels that he and the government are personally responsible. This isn’t paternalism; your parents usually let you make your own decisions along about the age of 18. And it isn’t fair to nannies to call it “nanny state” regulation: after all, nannies are paid to take care of children until they can care for themselves; they don’t barge into your home or your bar or your restaurant uninvited, issuing orders to adults. Maybe the right term is food fascism, for the attempt to use force to tell adults what they can and can’t eat, smoke, or purchase.

I’d rather the CDC stick to germs, because germs attack no matter what personal choices we make – they’re sort of like the guys who flew the planes into the WTC in that sense.  For 3,000 innocents, it didn’t really matter if they’d breakfasted over fried hashbrowns followed by a smoke, or ate fruit and nuts followed by yoga and deep breathing.  

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can only imagine what folks living elsewhere think when they see our California wildfires raging up hillsides, down canyons and through homes. I imagine it’s something like, “Why in the world would they live there?”

Well, “there” in most of California necessarily means somewhere in close proximity to chapparel or sage scrub, the two most prevelant plant communities from San Diego to Mendocino. And what a plant community it is! It doesn’t just burn; it has to burn, as John McPhee wrote in “The Control of Nature,”

High or low – hard, soft, or mixed – all chaparral has in common an always developing, relentlessly intensifying, vital necessity to burst into flame.  In a sense, chaparral consumes fire no less than fire consumes chaparral.  Fire nourishes and rejuvenates the plants. There are seeds that fall into the soil, stay there indefinitely, and will not germinate except in the aftermath of fire. …

When fire comes, it puts the nutrients [from mature shrubs] back in the ground. It clears the terrain for fresh growth.  When chaparral has not been burned for thirty years, about half the thicket will be dry dead stuff – twenty-five thousand tons of it in one quare mile.  The living plants are no less flammable. The chamise, the manzanita – in fact, most chaparral plants – are full of solvent extractives that burn intensely and ignite easily. Their leaves are glossy with oils and resins that seal in mositure during hot dry periods and serve the dual purpose of responding explosively to flame.

So Californians don’t really choose to live surrounded by chaparral and scrub. Unless they live packed in urban areas that were cleared of it by pioneers 150 years ago – who chose to live surrounded by it and clear it acre by acre – they have to put up with the stuff.  It’s pretty for a couple months of the year at best, fragrant with sage, resplendant in purple flowers, then it browns out and looks dead for the rest of the year.  And it burns.  But we can no more avoid it than Midwesterners can avoid living surrounded by agricultural fields.

Enter groups like the Coastal Property Owners Association of Big Sur, who watched 20 homes in their neighborhood burn last year, and who blame the regulatory rigidity of the California Coastal Commission – not oil-rich bushes – for their woes.  The Commission has rules that protect scrub and chaparral, and it requires homeowners to get a permit before they can trim back the explosive shrubs … permits that can be costly to pursue and difficult to get. 

[H]omeowners say the commission’s chaparral-protection rule blocks them from taking even basic precautions against wildfires, such as cutting a defensive perimeter around their homes, or from remodeling or expanding structures on their property.

They also contend that the definitions of precisely what constitutes maritime chaparral are vague, noting that the Coastal Commission staff said in one report that  “the syntaxonomy of maritime chaparral has not been formally studied, hence arguments as to the identity of a particular stand of chaparral as either falling within or without such a category is subject to the vacillation of personal opinion.”

The statement means that “people will have their land effectively condemned based upon the personal opinion of one person, the expert the county or commission requires them to hire to do a biological assessment of their property as part of the permit process. It seems you couldn’t find a more arbitrary and vague system for designating which land is ESHA and therefore essentially unusable,” said Michael Caplin, a member of the homeowners group who has lived in the area since the 1970s. ….

“Even when everybody could see the fire was raging, they said we had to get permits to cut. People didn’t have a choice. They had to get permits. Finally, the firefighters jumped right in, and of course they helped the property owners remove trees. It shouldn’t take a disaster like this to put some sense into the process,” [Lisa] Kleissner said. (Capitol Weekly) 

The Coastal Commission takes a “Who? Us?” attitude when accused of complicitcy in coastal area fire damage, and shifts the blame instead to the silly people who insist on living close to nature.  (The Commission is based in San Francisco, which was stripped of its habitat before the beginning of the 20th century.)

“The central message here for us is that the maritime chaparral, like the San Diego coast sage shrub, are not just fire-prone, they are fire-dependent. They have evolved over a millenium to require fire to regenerate. They have to burn, they will burn,” said Coast Commission spokeswoman Sarah Christie.

“When people build in those kinds of habitats, you have to expect that there are going to be wildfires. When a wildfire is raging out of control, it’s not reasonable to expect that you would be able to clear enough vegetation from around your house to keep it from harm’s way. People are emotional distressed and they are looking to lash out. Those fires were caused by natural forces. The Coastal Commission can’t control the lightning.”

Imagine being a coastal California homeowner looking at the charred skeleton of your home and reading that. You might be tempted to lash out.  Of course Commission staffers aren’t out there starting fires; that’s hardly the point, Ms. Christie, even if the Commission’s rules against thinning without permits may intensify the fires.  The point is, the Commission could do something to help contain the fires, but it puts Gaea first and people second.

It would be an interesting study to compare houses lost to wildfire in the coastal region to the number lost in scrub/chaparral habitat outside the Coastal Zone.  I’m sure the difference would be remarkable.  Outside the Coastal Zone, developers and homebuilders work with the less rigid California Department of Fish & Game and their local fire department to develop a fire plan that involves thinning native habitat around new homes. 

It works like a charm.  In last year’s Yorba Linda fire, one of the most exposed neighborhoods of all, Casino Ridge, which was surrounded on three sides by raging fire, lost not a single home because it was newly built and contained a carefully engineered “fuel modification zone” that knocked down the fire for the firefighters.  The neighborhood with the most losses, Hidden Hills, was built before the practice was put into effect, and had scrub growing up to the backyards of most of the homes.

The Coastal Commission’s desire to save every chaparral and coastal sage bush it can makes engineering protections like Casino Ridge’s in the Coastal Zone vastly more difficult.

It may all get down to varying views of how much of this stuff there is around us.  When I was fighting to keep the California gnatcatcher from being listed as endangered, we found a simple, dumb mathematical error in the fed’s computation of habitat loss.  They put it at 95 percent gone, but if they’d done their math right, they would have seen it was actually 70 percent lost – and that was based on suspect data; the actual amount lost is almost certainly much lower.

As for chaparral, locals say there’s 1.3 million acres of it, but the Commission clings to an entirely insane 20,000-acre figure, which it gets by counting only eugenically pure patches of the stuff with no other plants gumming up the purity.  It’s an absurd and artificial standard, and it’s causing houses to burn.

So it’s your choice: Is California going down the tubes or up in smoke? Or both?

hat-tip: Marshall

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lease don’t tell the Obamacrats because they really want to seize control of our pocketbooks and our will via the insatiable need to control anthropgenic global warming, and they don’t want any news that runs counter to their dreams of climatic totalitarianism, but shoot, these pesky facts just keep showing up.

But don’t blame me; blame Bluegrass Pundit:

The Argos sensor buoys were deployed in hope of getting better ocean temperature data. This data was to support the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. The actual result is the buoys have found a slight ocean cooling in the six years they have been deployed.

The biggest problem with the Argos sensor buoy findings is the readings fly in the face of major climate change computer models. These models postulate that as much as 80-90 per cent of global warming will result from the oceans warming rapidly then releasing their heat into the atmosphere. The data is proving the global warming model wrong. Surface temperature sensors have been finding the additional evidence of global cooling.

Here’s some more, from the source material he used:

When they were first deployed in 2003, the Argos were hailed for their ability to collect information on ocean conditions more precisely, at more places and greater depths and in more conditions than ever before.

No longer would scientists have to rely on measurements mostly at the surface from older scientific buoys or inconsistent shipboard monitors.

So why are some scientists now beginning to question the buoys’ findings? Because in five years the little blighters have failed to detect any global warming. They are not reinforcing the scientific orthodoxy of the day, namely that man is causing the planet to warm dangerously. They are not proving the predetermined conclusions of their human masters. Therefore [the buoys], and not their masters’ hypotheses, must be wrong.

Here’s my question:  Why do some scientists – those that would question the buoy’s findings – allowed anywhere close to the global warming debate?  They obviously have lost all objectivity if they’ve gone from attacking folks like me who ask questions and start attacking inanimate scientific equipment.

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araphrasing the Stones, you don’t always get the placement you want.  Sometimes, like above, ad juxtaposition can turn out pretty darn funny.  At other times, the results can be downright appalling – like the article on the toddler killed in a house fire bumped up against the ad headlined “Burn, Baby Burn!”

See more examples of weird juxtapositions here.

Somehow, this all reminds me of what was supposedly the most nefarious newspaper headline of all time.  Journalistic mythology – or maybe history – says it appeared over a story about an insane asylum inmate who broke out, then broke into a house and raped a woman.  The headline?

Nut Bolts, Screws

Myth? Fact? Who knows? Probably the former.  But here’s one that is real; I can attest to that personally.  Elder Brother spent a summer as a copy editor for The Shipping and Trade News, an English-language Tokyo newspaper full of, you know, news about shipping and trading.  One day he was tasked with editing and writing the headline for a story about a spiffy new sewage barge Tokyo had just put into service, replacing an older barge whose mechanical bucket just wasn’t capable of keeping up with the monstrous amounts of raw sewage waiting to be dumped into the once-pristine waters of Tokyo Bay.  His headline?  For real:

The Rise and Fall of the Turd Winch

Hat-tip for the unfortunately placed ad link:  Incredible Daughter #1

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In a shell game of incredibly devious intent, our oh-so-popular president proposed to slap a burdensome carbon tax on every man, woman and child from Bangor to Chula Vista in order to fund his vaunted middle class tax cut.  Americans either loved the idea or were dazzled blind by the idea of having America’s first black president, and they voted for the guy.

Well, goodbye middle class tax cut.

Obama is discovering that Americans – even many Americans who happen to have a “D” after their name and who hang out on Capitol Hill – are not keen on his carbon taxes.

House Democrats tried to sneak out at the last hour before the weekend touted a weakened global-warming package Friday, releasing a compromise plan that undercuts President Obama’s hopes to raise nearly $650 billion from the climate bill to pay for middle-class tax cuts.

Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who have been locked in debate over how to tax carbon-dioxide emissions while protecting American industries, said Friday that their revised plan would give away 85 percent of the plan’s carbon permits for free.

Under Mr. Obama’s original plan, businesses and other users would be required to shoot themselves in the head in the name of global warming purchase all of the permits through an auction, with the proceeds returned to middle- and lower-class taxpayers. (WashTimes)

The original Waxman-Markey bill, with its full-blown, nasty carbon tax, was blown out of the water by Dems from states dependent on coal and oil (that would be about 50 states, by my count).

So we have a victory of sorts in the works … but a frightening one.  Waxman-Markey still puts a cap-and-trade mechanism in place; hence Obamamouth Robert Gibbs says the prez would be happy to sign even the watered down bill.  You bet he would.  It puts a cap-and-trade infrastructure in place, taxes 15 percent of American industry, and starts the clock ticking towards the time when all those free credits start costing.

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he bald eagle is the pride and joy of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service would like to tell you so itself:

A North American species with a historic range from Alaska and Canada to northern Mexico, the bald eagle is an Endangered Species Act success story.

Forty years ago, our national symbol was in danger of extinction throughout most of its range. Habitat destruction and degradation, illegal shooting … decimated the eagle population. Habitat protection afforded by the Endangered Species Act … and conservation actions taken by the American public have helped bald eagles make a remarkable recovery.

The ellipses are there to remove references to DDT, the first being “and the contamination of its food source, largely as a consequence of DDT, and the second citing “the federal government’s banning of DDT” as a primary reason for recovery. We wouldn’t want to diminish the Fish & Wildlife Services pride by pointing out that the EPA, not the FWS, regulates DDT.

And it’s really not nice to point out that many hold that the ESA may do more harm than good in protecting some species.  As Brian Seasholes of the Reason Foundation points out:

Most landowners want to have, and help, rare species on their land.  But the government’s harsh penalties and the dire financial consequences that can come with finding an endangered species on your property are encouraging landowners to make their land inhospitable to endangered species by destroying their habitat.

Seasholes goes on to say that if someone wanted to write a law aimed at harming wildlife, it would be hard to top the ESA – but I don’t think he had the bald eagle and the giant cormorant on his mind.  Still, it’s a pretty darn good case of ESA harming wildlife.  AP reports that bald eagles are now so prevalent in some areas that they are posing a threat to other bird species by gobbling up their young.  Of particular note are the giant cormorants of Maine, whose numbers have dropped from 250 pairs to 80, due primarily to bald eagle predation.

“They’re like thugs. They’re like gang members. They go to these offshore islands where all these seabirds are and the birds are easy picking,” said Brad Allen, a wildlife biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. “These young eagles are harassing the bejesus out of all the birds, and the great cormorants have been taking it on the chin.”

By comparison, bald eagles were down to about 400 pairs in the U.S.; now there are about 10,000.  And it’s not just eagles, and it’s not just Maine.  Here in California we have protected foxes eating protected shorebirds, and one of the jobs government wildlife specialists do but don’t want to talk about is trapping and killing one species to protect another species, which happens all the time.  Someone should alert PETA!

Here’s a novel idea.  Stop regulating endangered species habitat on private land.

About 30% of the U.S. – 650 million acres – is federally owned, and states own huge amounts of land as well – like the 600,000 state-owned acres in Maine, where the bald eagles are giving the cormorants such a bad time.  Together, state and federally owned land and land held by private conservation organizations is somewhere over 40% of the U.S. land mass.

Let the animals figure out how to survive on that land.  Sure, you can keep restrictions in place not allowing the hunting of endangered species on any land, but knock off all the habitat restrictions on private land.  Show the critters all the land the feds and states have to offer them, sing a bit of Sinatra – “If you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere,” and be done with it.

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