Freedom Line Blog

Those who believe that it’s in the best interest of the nation for Barack Obama’s presidency to terminate next January have been feeling their oats a bit lately. As Jennifer Rubin noted yesterday at the Washington Post’s “Right Turn” blog:

Whatever you think is the cause of the economic doldrums, it has now dawned on the Democrats and the press that Obama could lose this thing.

Quite so. But even if one indulges in the most optimistic projections for November, there’s a danger in getting too comfortable. There could be mischief brewing for the lame duck congressional session following the presidential election. As Conn Carroll reports in the Washington Examiner:

At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing Wednesday, [Senator John] Kerry announced that he would not be submitting the United Nations Conventions on the Law of the Sea [LOST] for a vote before the November election. Instead, Kerry intends to hold a series of hearings before the election, building the case for passage, before pushing the treaty in a lame-duck session. This is the exact same game plan Kerry executed to pass the New START treaty during the 2010 lame duck…

…If the Senate approves LOST this December, any country that believes itself harmed by global warming could force the U.S. into binding arbitration, most likely in front of the Annex VII Arbitral Tribunal, LOST’s default dispute resolution forum.

Any judgment from that tribunal would be final, unappealable, and immediately enforceable in U.S. federal court. In 1982, a similar arbitration body forced Canada to set hourly caps on their sulfur dioxide emissions, causing industry to spend millions on mitigation efforts. A LOST tribunal could set similar caps on U.S. carbon emissions, triggering trillions in economic damage.

Cap and trade, of course, was Obama’s other major first-term initiative besides Obamacare, but when the politics surrounding the former issue became toxic — and congressional Republicans hit back hard on the cap and trade plan — the administration backed off. But is anyone willing to bet that Obama’s sense of fair play will prevent him from backdooring through the policy in the dying days of his administration?

If so, you’d have to believe that a president who has no compunctions about stripping fundamental religious freedoms through administrative fiat, who’s already busy promising the Russian government that he’ll “have more flexibility” on missile defense when he doesn’t have to face the American electorate again, and who has already flirted with extralegal methods for enacting international carbon reduction would suddenly be stricken by conscience after facing the sting of rejection from the voters.

Those odds don’t look good. Which is why conservatives need to remain on guard until the day Obama departs for Chicago.

Free Market America, a new group operating in partnership with Americans for Limited Government, has a powerful new video out that makes an important point: if one was setting out to intentionally inflict harm on the American economy via energy policy, the resulting strategy would look a lot like what the Obama Administration is proposing.

The point here is not that Obama’s agenda is a covert plot to damage the nation — it’s not — but rather that its effects will be just as calamitous as if it was. Take a look for yourself:

Unbelievable. From the Daily Caller:

Concerned that too many “deniers” are in the meteorology business, global warming activists this month launched a campaign to recruit local weathermen to hop aboard the alarmism bandwagon and expose those who are not fully convinced that the world is facing man-made doom.

The Forecast the Facts campaign — led by 350.org, the League of Conservation Voters and the Citizen Engagement Lab — is pushing for more of a focus on global warming in weather forecasts, and is highlighting the many meteorologists who do not share their beliefs.

“Our goal is nothing short of changing how the entire profession of meteorology tackles the issue of climate change,” the group explains on their website. “We’ll empower everyday people to make sure meteorologists understand that their viewers are counting on them to get this story right, and that those who continue to shirk their professional responsibility will be held accountable.”

I’m not sure whether my title line sounds more like a disreputable law firm or an unpublished fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. Anyway …

There are a lot of good points flying around these discussions. Let me hit on a couple of things in Ashton’s post from earlier today.

He’s certainly right that Santorum may get an unexpected star turn during the NewsMax debate moderated by Donald Trump later this month. Like Ashton, I find the whole affair unsavory (a point I’ve been making over at Ricochet, though I’ve been getting significant pushback there), but I find Santorum’s decision to participate much more reasonable than Newt’s. The former is in such dire need of a Hail Mary pass that he can’t let quibbles with the format keep him from one last shot at a broad swath of the electorate. Newt, whose surge is continuing unabated, doesn’t need the exposure — and his participation is at odds with his repeated insistence that he’s the Serious candidate in the race.

One final note regarding Huntsman, whom Ashton mentioned in passing. As the anti-Newt campaign has developed legs in recent weeks (particularly with the Republican establishment in Washington), there has been yet another search for a conservative alternative, which has led some pundits (including the esteemed George Will) to posit that Huntsman deserves another look. Their rationale? That the former Utah governor has been the most consistently conservative candidate in the field — both in rhetoric and in record — on taxes, guns, and abortion.

This is another example of the principle I keep coming back to as we discuss presidential candidates: having the right positions on paper is necessary, but not sufficient. Huntsman may be good on a handful of issues, but his campaign has been weighed down by the fact that he consistently picks fights with the conservative base, often over superfluous issues (did we really need another election year argument over evolution? Has there ever been a significant presidential decision that hinged on that debate?). He’s the guy who comes back from a stint as Ambassador to China to tell us how bad we look overseas. He’s the guy who tells the Republican Party how primitive it is. And the primary he’d most like to win is with the media.

Why hasn’t Huntsman taken off? Because the only time he communicates with conservatives is to tell them how ashamed of them he is.

It’s a little something called “false consciousness.” An essential aspect of Marxist thinking (though it was actually propagated by his partner, Friedrich Engels), false consciousness is a term that one uses to tell an ideological adversary, in essence, “You disagree with me not because of your reasoned conclusion, but because your ability to understand reality is so polluted as to prevent you from even discovering truth without the enlightened guidance of your betters.”

That seems to be the tact that former Vice President Gore is taking on — what else? — climate change skepticism. And his need for proselytization is now taking on a particularly bizarre form. According to Reuters:

“24 Hours of Reality” will broadcast a presentation by Al Gore every hour for 24 hours across 24 different time zones from Wednesday to Thursday, with the aim of convincing climate change deniers and driving action against global warming among households, schools and businesses.

The campaign also asks people to hand over control of their social networking accounts on Facebook and Twitter to it for 24 hours to deliver Gore’s message.

That last paragraph is particularly cultish. Tell the former VP to get his own damn Twitter account.

Gore and his ilk are accustomed to referring to their critics as “anti-science”. Yet they’re the ones engaged in something that sounds a lot more like televangelism than a climatology symposium.

Here’s an idea: if Gore really wants to be seen as a paragon of sweet reason — and really intends to convert the skeptics — why not have that hour of programming feature a debate between himself and one of the leading critics of his theories? Someone, perhaps, like Christopher Monckton of the British House of Lords, the former Thatcher advisor who has been challenging Gore to a scrimmage on global warming for years.

Of course, this format would put Gore on the spot. But when the science is ‘undeniable’ that should be an easy fight to win, no?

If the real purpose of presidential debates was to clarify the views of the candidates, then the next GOP forum would be Mitt Romney debating himself. From a report by Justin Sink in The Hill:

The Daily Express reports from the U.K. today that the BBC is taking a new approach to climate change skeptics: ignoring them outright. Here’s how the paper has it:

THE BBC was criticised by climate change sceptics yesterday after it emerged that their views will get less coverage because they differ from mainline scientific opinion.

In a report by its governing body, the BBC Trust, the corporation was urged to focus less on opponents of the “majority consensus” in its programmes.

It said coverage should not be tailored to represent a “false balance” of opinion if one side came from a minority group.

… Although he found no evidence of bias in BBC output, he suggested where there is a “scientific consensus” it should not hunt out opponents purely to balance the story.

Needless to say, the BBC’s decision strikes at the heart of both scientific and journalistic integrity. These are two fields where it should be universally recognized that truth is not whatever the majority says it is. As long as the BBC is going to be playing this game, however, let’s make it a fair fight. 

Clearly, we should not expect to hear minority points of view on the following propositions, all of which are supported by the vast majority of economists: Free trade is beneficial, the minimum wage is a job-killer, and outsourcing is a positive good. Since the experts have weighed in, we’re confident that the BBC will now get to work suppressing dissenters as a matter of civic hygiene. We look forward to their objectivity.

Megan L. Brown, a partner at Wiley Rein LLP in Washington, D.C., discusses American Electric Power Co., Inc. v. Connecticut, a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.  Brown articulates why the High Court should reject the “public nuisance” climate change claim brought by a handful of states against some of the nation’s largest electric utility companies.

Listen to the interview here.

Owsley Stanley, the famed 1960s “King of LSD” who helped pioneer the Grateful Dead’s trademark sound, has died following an auto accident in his adopted home country of Australia. So what led him to abandon America and flee to Australia, anyway?

It’s actually instructive regarding our current political climate.  Apparently, he became convinced during the 1970s that global cooling was about to trigger a new ice age, so he relocated to the southern hemisphere, which he considered less subject to that supposed oncoming disaster.  Mr. Stanley, of course, wasn’t alone in the global cooling hysteria.  Among others, Newsweek and The New York Times repeatedly sounded the alarm, and continuing climate alarmist Paul Ehrlich predicted massive crop failures and starvation.

Rest in peace, Owsley Stanley.  And thank you for the sobering lesson of the ephemeral nature of climate change alarmism amid the current fashion of global warming.

Since at least the FDR era, the Democratic Party has served as an umbrella for a motley coalition of special interest groups that have only one thing in common: demanding action from government.  Most of the time, the competing priorities of the groups don’t come into direct conflict.  But when they do, it is a delight to sit back and watch each carve up the other.

Today’s example comes from the pages of the Wall Street Journal.  Apparently, businesses in the energy sector aren’t the only ones fighting the Obama Administration’s job-killing EPA regulations.  Labor unions like the Utility Workers Union of America and the United Mine Workers are demanding a ceasefire on cap-it-or-close-it regulations that could force companies to close 18% of the nation’s coal factories if they fail to comply with the EPA’s proposed climate change rules.

Unions recognize that without factories workers get fired.  Environmentalists don’t want to budge on what the Natural Resources Defense Council calls “the biggest public health achievement” of the Obama Administration.

Simple math is likely to break the stalemate.  Unions in coal states account for millions of campaign contributions and thousands of votes.  With Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin all flipping from Obama in 2008 to the Republicans in 2010, don’t count on the president to sacrifice his reelection chances on the altar of green jobs.

If he does, union voters – and their dollars – just might stay home in 2012.

Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been upping the ante for global warming hyperventilation for decades. After all, this is the man who said that global warming would leave parts of Manhattan underwater in 20 years — 22 years ago.

Yet Hansen, who enjoys mainstream respectability on the left, has trumped even his own debased standards for cluelessness with a recent round of remarks in China. Writing in the Washington Times, the Cato Institute’s Patrick J. Michaels has some of the gory details:

According to Mr. Hansen, compared to China, we are “the barbarians” with a “fossil-money- ‘democracy’ that now rules the roost,” making it impossible to legislate effectively on climate change. Unlike us, the Chinese are enlightened, unfettered by pesky elections.

…

Mr. Hansen has another idea to circumvent our democracy. Because Congress is not likely to pass any legislation making carbon-based energy prohibitively expensive, he proposed, in the South China Morning Post, that China lead a boycott of our economy:

“After agreement with other nations, e.g., the European Union, China and these nations could impose rising internal carbon fees. Existing rules of the World Trade Organization would allow collection of a rising border duty on products from all nations that do not have an equivalent internal carbon fee or tax.

“The United States then would be forced to make a choice. It could either address its fossil-fuel addiction … or … accept continual descent into second-rate and third-rate economic well-being.”

It may not be necessary for climate change alarmists to make common cause with authoritarian statists the world over. But how many times does it have to happen before we can assume that it’s a feature, rather than an accessory, of the environmental left’s worldview?

In October 2003, tough-talking optimist Arnold Schwarzenegger unseated bland public union yes-man Gray Davis as Governor of California in a revolutionary special recall election.  Today, Schwarzenegger departs with a depressed 22% approval rating that serves as a warning for Republican newcomers in Congress and across the 50 states against the perils of go-along-to-get-along “bipartisanship.”

During his first two years in office, Schwarzenegger maintained a confrontational demeanor that California desperately needed as it hurtled toward its current disastrous state.  In March 2004, for instance, he famously ridiculed California’s milquetoast political class as “girlie-men.”

Unfortunately, four common-sense and ultimately necessary ballot initiatives that he supported failed in November 2005.  Instead of sticking to principles, Schwarzenegger opted for “bipartisan” political expediency and personal survival.  What followed was a shameful litany of global warming bills, ObamaCare-like proposals, lack of leadership and tax hikes.  His capitulation provided a short-term payoff via reelection in 2006, but ultimately proved disastrous for himself and the state.  Today, despite Schwarzenegger’s early promise, California is in even worse shape than when he entered office.  And jaded voters witnessed yet another sad example of a politician who promised to change the political culture, only to allow the political culture to change him.

Schwarzenegger’s failure, however, provides a helpful cautionary guide for incoming Republicans this new year.  Namely, sacrificing the principles that got you elected at the tempting altar of “bipartisanship” will only deepen our nation’s current difficulties and eventually doom you politically.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

March 2000:  Charles Onians of Britain’s The Independent penned a global-warming doomsday warning entitled “Snowfalls Are Now Just a Thing of the Past”:

Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change:  snow is starting to disappear from our lives…  According to Dr. David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become ‘a very rare and exciting event.’  ‘Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,’ he said.”

Does “the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia” ring a bell?  It was at the center of last year’s “Climategate” scandal in which global warming alarmists were shown to have manipulated their research and plotted against scientists whose views differed from their own.

Fast forward ten years, to December 2010, and a report from Britain’s Mail Online entitled “Coldest December Since Records Began as Temperatures Plummet to Minus 10 C Bringing Travel Chaos Across Britain”:

Swathes of Britain skidded to a halt today as the big freeze returned – grounding flights, closing rail links and leaving traffic at a standstill.  And tonight the nation was braced for another 10 inches of snow and yet more sub-zero temperatures – with no letup in the bitterly cold weather for at least a month, forecasters have warned.  The Arctic conditions are set to last through the Christmas and New Year bank holidays and beyond as temperatures plummeted to -10 C (14 F).  The Met Office said this December was ‘almost certain’ to become the coldest since records began in 1910.”

Thanks to Al Gore’s amazing Internet, which provides us a record to test the amazingly ludicrous assurances that he and his fellow climate change alarmists have made.

One month ago, we sat down with famed climate realist Bjorn Lomborg and published our commentary “‘Cool It’ – Bjorn Lomborg’s New Cinematic Rebuke to Global Warming Alarmists.”  Well, the movie’s debut finally arrives this week, and all of us who believe in individual freedom and oppose the worldwide effort to limit freedom and prosperity in pursuit of the extremist climate change agenda should make sure to see it.  The film is a remarkable rebuttal to, and debunking of, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” and we guarantee you’ll both enjoy and appreciate it.

It is important to support those who, like Lomborg, place their careers and even safety in pursuit of truth, so please take your friends along.  We’ve seen the film, and can guarantee you won’t regret it.  You can view the brief trailer, and locate cities and theaters here.  Enjoy!

Few things represent American ingenuity more than the incandescent light bulb.  Painstakingly created by Thomas Edison in the late 19th century, it also represents the more universal concepts of hard work, persistence, creativity and the life-improving contributions of private entrepreneurs.

But Edison’s marvel is being relegated to anachronism status in our brave new world of hyper-regulatory big government.

This week in Winchester, Virginia, General Electric ceased operations at its last incandescent lightbulb factory.  Under new nanny-state energy regulations, incandescent lightbulbs will be prohibited and replaced by compact florescent bulbs whose unflattering light makes for an ugly, sinister symbol of the nitpicking green movement.  Most of those florescent bulbs are manufactured overseas, by the way, but that’s also of little concern to righteous green crusaders.

Question:  Anyone else get that sneaking suspicion that famed energy hypocrite Al Gore is hastily stockpiling incandescent bulbs at his various compounds as we speak?

But that doesn’t mean it’s changed its position.  Escalating the war on words that began by replacing ‘Global War on Terror’ with ‘Overseas Contingency Operation’ and ‘acts of terror’ with ‘man-made disasters,’ President Barack Obama’s advisors are once again going Orwellian.  Now, instead of ‘Global Warming’ or ‘Climate Change’ the president’s top climate czar John Holdren wants Americans to start saying ‘Global Climate Disruption.’

Not everyone is convinced the re-branding scheme will work:

“They’re trying to come up with more politically palatable ways to sell some of this stuff,” said Republican pollster Adam Geller, noting that Democrats also rolled out a new logo and now refer to the Bush tax cuts as “middle-class tax cuts.”

He said the climate change change-up likely derives from flagging public support for their bill to regulate emissions. He said the term “global warming” makes the cause easy to ridicule whenever there’s a snowstorm.

“Every time we’re digging our cars out — what global warming?” he said. “(Global climate disruption is) more of a sort of generic blanket term, I guess, that can apply in all weather conditions.”

Ostensibly, the name change is designed to make people take climate change more seriously.  More likely, it’ll have the opposite effect.

In response to the uncertainty created by the Obama Administration’s foolish drilling moratorium, which has now been overturned by two separate courts, Diamond Offshore Drilling, Inc. announced that it will shift its Ocean Endeavor operation to Egypt.  As The Wall Street Journal noted, “when it comes to a showdown between jobs and ideology, the Obama Administration never fails to choose the latter.”

The Ocean Endeavor contract was worth $100 million, and its loss will cost “a great deal” of American jobs.  Even Democrat Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana found herself forced to break with the Obama Administration, noting that the offshore drilling industry safely operates approximately 42,000 other wells and employs innumerable Gulf citizens both directly and indirectly.  Sadly, Obama once again seems to be stimulating the far-left activist community, but not the American economy or job climate.

Today marks the 40^th anniversary of Earth Day, now being celebrated in 190 countries by an estimated 1 billion people.  To put that in perspective, that number is roughly the amount of adherents claimed by the Roman Catholic Church.  And as Robert Nelson points out in the Detroit News, the environmentalism movement that birthed Earth Day has turned into its own religion.

America’s leading environmental historian, William Cronon of the University of Wisconsin, calls environmentalism a new religion because it offers “a complex series of moral imperatives for ethical action, and judges human conduct accordingly.”

In other words, issues such as climate change are now much more than about “science.”

And this places a greater burden on environmental theology than it is often able to handle. Success in stirring powerful religious feelings about the environment does not automatically lead to wise and effective policies.

But that’s not stopping Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, from pleading for a comprehensive climate change bill, a measure that will take the price distorting regulations on gas prices and impose them on every other energy sector.

Americans don’t need to pay more for less energy, Chairman Waxman.  Pass this bill and we’ll see if your eco-gods can deliver you from the voters’ wrath this November.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had some big news to announce yesterday.  So in typical Washington fashion, she did what any politician would do.  Pelosi called a press conference.  Her big news?  With the Capitol Hill press corps huddled before her, the Speaker announced that she had spent $140,000 in taxpayer money on new “energy efficient” light fixtures and window shades for the House cafeteria.

But that’s not all.  The fancy new light fixtures and window shades, which automatically raise and lower based on the amount of sunlight that shines through, were a bargain, according to Pelosi and Stephen Ayers, the Architect of the Capitol.  Indeed, Ayers bragged:

I think this fixture was $800 a year ago, and it’s now just over $300, so in one year that’s a pretty significant savings – which allows us to begin using this kind of equipment and technology, because we’re able to get a good return on investment.  At $800 a fixture we can’t get a good return on investment, but when it gets down to $300 – and I’m sure it will go even lower – we’re able to get a good return on investment.”

And just how “good” will that “return on investment” be?  So “good” that Ayers and Pelosi believe that, based on estimates of what will be saved in energy costs, it will only take, well, a mere decade for the light fixtures and window shades to pay for themselves. 

Okay, okay.   What’s $140,000 in the grand scheme of things?  Especially when you consider the federal deficit will exceed $1.5 trillion this year alone.  But that’s not the point.

At a time when millions of Americans are out of work, and millions more are taking to the streets to protest excessive government spending, including the Speaker’s push to cripple the U.S. economy with a “climate change” bill complete with a job-killing Cap-and-Trade scheme, it’s the symbolism of it all.

We’re sure there are many Americans who would love to replace the light fixtures and window treatments in their homes.  But times are tough.  Just as the average American family has been forced to do without new luxuries for their house, with record deficits strangling the federal budget, the time has long passed for Pelosi to do without in hers too!