Day: February 25, 2010

California AG tries to sabotage anti-cap-and-trade ballot initiative

California attorney general Jerry Brown is trying to sabotage the state anti-cap-and-trade ballot initiative by changing its name.

The ballot initiative would rollback the California cap-and-trade law (AB 32) pending a decline in state unemployment.

The original name of the ballot initiative was the:

California Jobs Initiative

The initiative’s new Brown-ized name is the:

Suspends Air Pollution Control Laws Requiring Major Polluters To Report And Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions That Cause Global Warming Until Unemployment Drops Below Specified Level For Full Year Initiative

Who wouldn’t vote for that?

The official announcement is below:

25 February 2010 – Update

Assemblyman Dan Logue, along with Congressman Tom McClintock and
Edward J. Costa INITIATIVE –

Received by Attorney General Office 25 November 2009- assigned number 09-0094 to the initiative titled California Jobs Initiative

On 03 February 2010, was renamed by Attorney General Jerry Brown to:

SUSPENDS AIR POLLUTION CONTROL LAWS REQUIRING MAJOR POLLUTERS TO REPORT AND REDUCE GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS THAT CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING UNTIL UNEMPLOYMENT DROPS BELOW SPECIFIED LEVEL FOR FULL YEAR. INITIATIVE STATUTE.

The INITIATIVE is to SUSPEND implementation of AB 32 (Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006) until unemployment in California drops below 5.5% for four consecutive quarters; it also prevents any agency from implementing any regulation of AB 32.

Negotiations are underway to modify the title authored by Attorney General Brown to more satisfactorily and truthfully reflect what the INITIATIVE really is intended.

To monitor progress of this INITIATIVE:
AG.CA.GOV/INITIATIVES/ACTIVEINDEX.PHP –
Select 2009 Initiatives and this is filed under 09-0094.

What would Reagan say about Obama?

Speaking before the Business Roundtable yesterday, President Obama denied that he was a socialist, stating:

“Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, I am an ardent believer in the free market… We have arrived at a juncture in our politics where reasonable efforts to update our regulations, or make basic investments in our future, are too often greeted with cries of ‘government takeover’ or even ‘socialism’…” [Emphasis added]

Now check out this excerpt from James Mann’s The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War (Viking 2009):

In a 1960 letter to Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, who had published an article by [screenwriter and Communist Party member Dalton Trumbo] and defended his right to freedom of speech, Reagan recalled how his views [on communism] had been formed during [the late-1940s]. “I once thought exactly as you think… It took seven months of meeting communists and communist-influenced people across a table in almost daily sessions while pickets rioted in front of studio gates, homes were bombed and a great industry almost ground to a halt.” What bothered Reagan above all, he wrote, was the discovery that Communist Party members operated in secret and did not tell the truth. “I, like you, will defend the right of any American to openly practice and preach any political philospophy from monarchy to anarchy,” he told Hefner. “But this is not the case with regard to the communist. He is bound by party discipline to deny that he is a communist so that he can by subversion and stealth impose on an unwilling people the rule of the International Communist Party which is in fact the government of Soviet Russia.” Anticommunism for Reagan, then, was not primarily foreign policy or geopolitics; it was personal and moralistic in nature, driven by his experiences with people he considered sophisticated and devious, who did not abide by the small-town Midwestern values he had absorbed in his youth.

While Obama says he’s for the free market and that his policies are not socialist, all his actions, policies and proposal are in actuality anti-free market and socialist — e.g., the auto takeover, cap-and-trade, and nationalized health care to name just a few. Moreover, Obama surrounds himself with admitted socialists and communists, like Carol Browner, Van Jones to name just two.

So what would Reagan say about Obama?

Pachauri cancels US tour

IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri announced yesterday that the IPCC was working on a strategy to better police the experts who produce its studies, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Pachauri said,

“We certainly don’t feel comfortable with the loss of even one iota of trust.”

So how many iotas are there in a sh**load, Raj?

Pachauri’s comments come in the wake of the cancellation of his high-profile visit to the US. He was scheduled to be a keynote speaker at the Wall Street Journal’s ECO-nomics conference (March 3-5 in Santa Barbara) and at the energy conference CERAWEEK 2010 (March 8-12 in Houston).

In addition to Climategate, Pachauri is laboring under revelations of financial conflicts of interest between his heading the IPCC and his private consultancies/board memberships/employment by renewable energy firms.

It could be, of course, that Pachauri simply couldn’t decide which of his custom-tailored suits to bring along on his trip — each of which costs about 10% of what the average worker in India makes.