EM,
SORRY I DIDN’T GET BACK TO YOU SOONER. Grandma’s had a bad cold lately so I’ve had to put away my journalistic hobby horse and attend to some extra honey-do’s. Judging by the latest news from our nation’s capital, President Obama may also have to put away some hobby horses these days.
After he won the election in November, Obama obviously inferred from the exit polls that he had a mandate to tax, spend and raise the national debt limit as much as he wanted. (See Byron Tau’s Dec. 12 report, “Poll: Obama has a mandate to raise taxes,” on Politico.com.) Since the election, though, the president has hit a few bumps in the road.
One of the biggest was when EPA head Lisa Jackson recently quit her job to protest Obama’s planned approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. Like her boss, Jackson is a progressive purist. Her M.O. is “my way or the highway.” In her, it seems, Obama has met his match.
So now who will manage the 18,000 EPA bureaucrats responsible for enforcing the 1,824 green regulations Jackson has imposed on private industry? (See “Goodbye Lisa Jackson,” National Review Online, Jan. 7.) And what will happen to the carbon tax Obama and Ms. Jackson had planned for the president’s second term?
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Energy Secretary Steven Chu may soon be leaving, too. These are the same guys who signed off on the millions of dollars in taxpayer losses incurred by such failed green energy companies as Abound Solar ($400 million), Evergreen Solar ($25 million), Nordic Windpower ($16 million), Range Fuels ($80 million), and Solyndra ($535 million). (“President Obama’s Taxpayer-backed Green Energy Failures,” Heritage.org, Oct. 18).
Now even Al Gore’s holy war against global warming is under attack. Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr. has exposed the mainstream media’s habit of fudging numbers to spin the latest NOAA statistics on temperature change in the lower 48 states (“Our ‘Hottest Year’ and Al Gore’s Epic Failure,” Jan. 12). Specifically, Jenkins quotes from the New York Times climate blog: “The temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree, but 2012 blew away the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit.”
“If that were true,” Jenkins concludes, “then the hair-on-fire news should have been the fact that 2012 was 2.13 degrees hotter than 2011.” As a coup de grace, Jenkins adds: “Nor was it mentioned that 2008, in the contiguous U.S., was two degrees cooler than 2006. Or that 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 were all cooler than 1998 by a larger margin than 2012 was hotter than 1998.” No wonder the mainstream media now uses the term “climate change” instead of global warming!
There’s even more hot breaking climate change news, though. It involves yet another and totally different scientific explanation for climate change: sun spots. In a Sept. 6, 2012 Washington Times report titled “Sunspots do impact climate,” Willie Soon and William M. Briggs observe, “The evidence in … data we have analyzed is consistent with the hypothesis that the sun causes climate change, especially in the Arctic, China and the United States. (Our) data also clearly invalidate the hypothesis that CO2 is the most important cause of observed temperature changes across the United States.”
The fact is, the White House now has much more to worry about than climate change. In addition to our worsening domestic economy, al Qaeda is back with a vengeance, spreading into Algeria and Mali. Remember Joe Biden’s preposterous pre-election boast that “Osama Bin Laden is Dead and General Motors is Alive?” As the much wiser Yogi Berra would say, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”
Bruce Robinson is an author and former Benicia resident.
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Brucey Bruce: The GOOD News is, Mitt and his Schwinn-riding Pizza Delivery Boy Ryan are now history…and with the small diversity within the Republican party, unless they expand their membership, they will all die off as bitter, old white men, spewing the same old ideologies: imperialistic resource grabbing, guns, tanks, and drones, and not butter, education, and infrastructure; petro-chemical non-science; and limiting the voting rights of others where applicable…The progressives, Independents, and Democrats may do just fine without them… Good luck to Em, also, I suggest that she diversify her mentors to include all faiths and planet dwellers with a diversity of opinions and agenda/options…Peter Bray, Benicia, CA
Bruce, like many who are more politically tendentious than philosophically scientific in seeking truth, you grab at any parts of the data involved in an issue, parts that seem to support your wishfully foregone conclusion or bias, and substitute them for the wholeness you lack. If you were an ethical person and moral writer, you would start discussing things with Jerome Page directly instead of pouring your opinionated sludge out into newsprint.
You aren’t honest or fair minded enough to do that. You would rather pretend to address your daughter whose mind you try to infect with your own rubbish, instead of talk maximal sense to the public.. With many parents who mistake projecting personal authority in place of real love upon children growing mature enough to think for themselves and to find truth on their own, your “love” tries to mold them in your own image while ignorance of your deficiencies. One does well to approach children with some humility as they near or reach adulthood. But, as is the case with all the self-styled conservatives who get printed in our Benicia Herald Forum, humility is a quality you distinctly lack. Careful balance expressed in a world of fact is a lot harder than cavalier, slap-dash tossing of feces at crowds the way chimpanzees do in the zoo.
The fact that you reach for support from news-bloggers, National Review, Wall Street Journal and Heritage shows you participate in the radical disinformation bubble. You should be ashamed of smearing Al Gore and Joe Biden who are better men than you, whatever their faults, and more accomplished human beings.
See corrected text below.
Robert, I simply cannot let you get away with this, without calling you out on the hypocrisy of this statement:
If you were an ethical person and moral writer, you would start discussing things with Jerome Page directly instead of pouring your opinionated sludge out into newsprint.
Two issues at play here:
1) Mr. Page rarely comments in this forum, which is a choice he has made and I have no disagreements with that position, a position which has nothing to do with his ethics, or morals; it is simply his choice.
2) Mr. Page has published at least two (and likely more) pieces in the Herald were he responded directly to comments made to him in this Forum (one of which was a question I asked and one was a response to a comment Mr. Ernst made regarding his piece “Feeling the Heat”). He also dedicated an entire piece to addressing the deniers.
You seemed to voice no concerns on those occasions.
The only way your comment cannot be taken as pure unadulterated typical progressive style hypocrisy is if you have the courage to direct that same statement towards Mr. Page as well. If you choose not to address the same comment to Mr. Page, it should be withdrawn from this forum, via the issuance of an apology to Mr. Robinson
So, Mr. Shelby, how will you (in a 1000 words or less, please) address this apparent double standard you impose on Mr. Robinson, yet ignore with Mr. Page?
Shame on your own dastardly, upside down hypocrisy, Dennis. My critique clearly includes your ill-pointed viewpoint.
Who said anything about mediating a Robinson/Page dialogue through these comment threads?! That’s anything but direct communication. The two live in the same town, so it isn’t impossible to talk in person, by phone or personal email.
Your notion, Dennis, of “pure unadulterated typical progressive style hypocrisy” is, once again, a projection of your own despicable partiality and duplicity. Quit your foolish “double standard” jazz. There’s no comparison between approaches to subject of these two men. Page seeks truth. Robinson seeks whatever
“truth” he wants, just as you do, though I confess, you can put up a good facade of intellectual integrity and diligence, at times.
Bruce has not lived in Benicia for quite some time now Robert. I also see the old Robert is back, just as I thought a new leaf may have been turned.
Bruce, like many who are more politically tendentious than philosophically scientific in seeking truth, you grab at any parts of the data involved in an issue, parts that seem to support your wishfully foregone conclusion or bias, and substitute them for the wholeness you lack. If you were an ethical person and moral writer, you would start discussing things with Jerome Page directly instead of pouring your opinionated
sludge out into newsprint.
You aren’t honest or fair minded enough to do that. You would rather pretend to address your daughter whose mind you try to infect with your own rubbish, instead of talk maximal sense to the public. With many parents who mistake projecting personal authority in place of real love upon children growing mature enough to think for themselves and to find truth on their own, your “love” tries to mold them in your own image while ignorant of your deficiencies. One does well to approach children with some humility as they near or reach adulthood. But, as is the case with all the self-styled conservatives who get printed in our Benicia Herald Forum, humility is a quality you distinctly lack. Careful balance expressed in a world of fact is a lot harder than cavalier, slap-dash tossing of feces at crowds the way chimpanzees do in the zoo.
The fact that you reach for support from news-bloggers, National Review, Wall Street Journal and Heritage shows you participate in the radical disinformation bubble. You should be ashamed of smearing Al Gore and Joe Biden who are better men than you, whatever their faults, and more accomplished human beings.
If my grandpa sent me a letter like this I’d have him checked for dementia.
Your hose is clogged, HOSE-A. But, little else can be expected of wingnuts and juvenile trolls.
ad hominem ad infinitum
This column states the following: “So now who will manage the 18,000 EPA bureaucrats responsible for enforcing the 1,824 green regulations Jackson has imposed on private industry? (See “Goodbye Lisa Jackson,” National Review Online, Jan. 7.)”
The article referenced states: “Under Jackson’s leadership, the EPA has issued a whopping 1,824 regulations, according to a count by Diane Katz, a research fellow in regulatory policy at the Heritage Foundation.”
There is no indication that the “1,824 regulations” are “green”.
If I’m not mistaken, they might be a difference between “global” and “contiguous U.S.”.
they = there