California Conservative

According to Scott Rasmussen’s polling, “Fifty-six percent (56%) of Americans say they are not willing to pay more in taxes and utility costs to generate cleaner energy and fight global warming.” Here’s more of the details on Scott’s polling:

• Fifty-six percent (56%) of Americans say they are not willing to pay more in taxes and utility costs to generate cleaner energy and fight global warming.
• A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey, taken since the climate change bill was passed on Friday, finds that 21% of Americans are willing to pay $100 more per year for cleaner energy and to counter global warming. Only 14% are willing to pay more than that amount.
• Fifty-two percent (52%) of all adults say it is more important to keep the cost of energy as low as possible than it is to develop clean, environmentally friendly sources of energy. But 41% disagree and say developing cleaner, greener energy sources is the priority.
• Sixty-three percent (63%) rate creating jobs as more important than taking steps to stop global warming. For 22%, stopping global warming is more important.

By an almost 3:1 margin, Americans favor keeping their money vs. paying more to “save the planet.” That’s nothing short of shocking. NOT!!! If Congress passes this bill and President Obama signs it into law, it will be just the latest proof that this Democratic administration and this Democrat Congress care more about their special interest allies than they care about the American people or science-based environmental policy. (more…)

If there’s anything that Tom Friedman’s article does, it’s to clarify that Tom Friedman is as clueless about climate change as anyone in the media.

There is much in the House cap-and-trade energy bill that just passed that I absolutely hate. It is too weak in key areas and way too complicated in others. A simple, straightforward carbon tax would have made much more sense than this Rube Goldberg contraption. It is pathetic that we couldn’t do better. It is appalling that so much had to be given away to polluters. It stinks. It’s a mess. I detest it.

Now let’s get it passed in the Senate and make it law.

Why? Because, for all its flaws, this bill is the first comprehensive attempt by America to mitigate climate change by putting a price on carbon emissions. Rejecting this bill would have been read in the world as America voting against the reality and urgency of climate change and would have undermined clean energy initiatives everywhere.

I’m tempted to tell Friedman to interview Bob Weisman on the realities of the effect Waxman-Markey would have on climate change. Here’s what Professor Weisman said in April about the National Energy Tax:

Despite disagreeing with him “100 percent, politically,” Weisman said he agreed with Horner that the Obama administration’s cap-and-trade program likely won’t do anything to effect climate change. “Like the Kyoto treaty, it won’t bring down global warming,” Weisman said. “You’d need something more like a 40 percent cut in emissions (to do that).”

Let’s summarize what Waxman-Markey will and won’t do. It won’t affect climate change one iota. We’d need a dramatic drop in greenhouse gas emissions to accomplish that, something that won’t happen with China dramatically increasing their greenhouse gas emissions. Something that Waxman-Markey is is a huge job-killing tax increase. People living in America’s heartland understand that this is destructive legislation that doesn’t have anything to do with improving the environment. (more…)

Steve Findlay’s op-ed in Tuesday’s USA Today contains a fatal flaw in it. Let’s see if you spot it:

Socialized medicine. Government-run health care. Rationing. Bureaucrats in charge. “Cookbook” medicine. Waiting lines. It’ll break the bank.

Welcome to the health care debate 2009. Sound familiar? These notions aim to instill fear. And once again, they bear no more relation to the reality of what is being debated in Washington than was the case when the Clintons had a go at health reform in the 1990s. Don’t be misled this time. In fact, far more bipartisan agreement exists on many core elements of reform than you might think.

Socialized, government-run health care? Nothing President Obama or Congress is proposing would replicate the Canadian, British, or French systems or remotely resemble nationalized medical service. Rather, the proposals offer repairs to an American system that is both broken and going broke. Those proposals build on our current private system where most people younger than 65 get coverage through their employers and treatment through private-sector doctors and hospitals.

What would be new is that people who don’t have access to such coverage (and some who do) would be able to get coverage through insurance “exchanges.” They’d be able to choose from a batch of private plans and policies that would have to accept all comers, offer comprehensive coverage, and be barred from “cherry-picking” only healthy people.

Guess what? Democrats and Republicans embrace the idea of exchanges and broad new federal insurance rules. They also agree that this new proposed system would be a boon to private insurers, doctors, hospitals, nursing homes and drug companies. That’s because tens of billions of dollars of government funds would help many of the 46 million uninsured get coverage. (more…)

The Supreme Court just overturned Judge Sotomayor’s ruling regarding a set of New Haven, CT firefighters:

The Supreme Court has ruled that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.

New Haven was wrong to scrap a promotion exam because no African-Americans and only two Hispanic firefighters were likely to be made lieutenants or captains based on the results, the court said Monday in a 5-4 decision. The city said that it had acted to avoid a lawsuit from minorities.

The ruling could alter employment practices nationwide, potentially limiting the circumstances in which employers can be held liable for decisions when there is no evidence of intentional discrimination against minorities.

This ruling isn’t likely to keep Judge Sotomayor from becoming the next associate justice but it’s bound to open up a great line of questioning for Republicans serving on the Judiciary Committee. It’s perfectly acceptable to ask her what her reasoning was in reaching that ruling.

Technorati Tags: SCOTUS, Sonia Sotomayor, Discrimination, Confirmation Hearings, Judiciary Committee

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

When you strip away all the peripheral stuff, health care reform comes down to choosing what our priorities are. Would we put a higher priority on good accessability and great quality in health care or do we prefer a system that features universal coverage and price controls. We know that President Obama chose the high quality option:

Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist and researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center, said that elites often propose health care solutions that limit options for the general public, secure in the knowledge that if they or their loves ones get sick, they will be able to afford the best care available, even if it’s not provided by insurance.

Devinsky asked the president pointedly if he would be willing to promise that he wouldn’t seek such extraordinary help for his wife or daughters if they became sick and the public plan he’s proposing limited the tests or treatment they can get.

The president refused to make such a pledge, though he allowed that if “it’s my family member, if it’s my wife, if it’s my children, if it’s my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.

(more…)

Rep. Steny Hoyer, (D-MD), and George Miller, (D-CA), had an op-ed in Thursday morning’s WSJ that is as filled with hypocrisy as any op-ed I’ve ever read. It didn’t take them long to launch into their hypocrisy:

In recent years, America’s fiscal story has been one of steady decline, from record surpluses to record deficits. In 2001, the federal government had a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion. Today, we are looking at a fiscal year 2009 deficit of $1.7 trillion.

A number of factors have brought us to this cash-strapped point, including reckless tax cuts, the cost of two wars, entitlement programs that have grown on autopilot, and the necessary, though costly, efforts to get our economy out of recession. But by far the worst decision was the abandonment in the Bush years of the principle that our country should pay for what it buys. It’s time to learn from that error and establish that principle in law.

President Obama has made the pay-as-you-go rule, a.k.a. “paygo”, a central part of his campaign for fiscal responsibility. Under paygo, Congress is compelled to find savings for the dollars it spends. In the 1990s, paygo proved to be one of our most valuable tools for climbing out of a budgetary hole. As President Obama put it earlier this month, “It is no coincidence that this rule was in place when we moved…to record surpluses in the 1990s, and that when this rule was abandoned, we returned to record deficits that doubled the national debt.”

First off, PAYGo doesn’t compel Congress “to find savings for the dollars it spends.” In Speaker Pelosi’s House of Representatives, PAYGo’s requirements are met with a job-killing tax increase. What’s insulting is that these jackasses are now preaching fiscal responsibility after rushing through a stimulus bill that (a) they didn’t read and (b) that was at least half pork, after passing a super-sized omnibus bill and after passing President Obama’s budget, which will cause $9,300,000,000,000 in additional debt. (more…)

After decades of decline, the war on infectious disease was all but over by 1981. Faced with severe budget cuts, scientists had to make up a pandemic or sell shoes at Macy’s. So when a tiny group of gay men succumbed to their toxic misbehavior the scientists had their pretext.

After nearly three decades of self-serving research and a trillion wasted tax dollars, AIDS has never been identified as a leading cause of death and two large prizes for proof of HIV and AIDS causation remain unclaimed.

In the latest sign that the wheels are falling from NIAID’s little red propaganda wagon, Apartheid’s mercenary offspring are starting to get reckless.

In the past 45 days I have reported that:

• HIV/AIDS drug cocktails are comprised of two components; 1) Zidovudine (AZT), a poison that compromises immune function and kills, and 2) Efavirenz (Sustiva), a powerful hypnotic that is so powerful that addicts now smoke it like crack. When stopped, Efavirenz also produces withdrawal symptoms that clinicians identify as the onset of AIDS.

• After years of unanswered criticism and questions about the alleged co-discoverer of HIV, Robert Gallo MD hired part-time security guard and filter salesman Nick Kontaratos to write Gallo’s definitive defense – a book praised by esteemed Nature and Science writer/editor Barbara Culliton as well as three of Gallo’s own research scientists. Either Kontaratos is the savant-like James Bond of filter-hawking security guards or Gallo’s well-funded enablers helped him promote a fake investigation – just as they promoted all of his other fake research.
• Groups like Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and AIDSTruth have nothing to do with AIDS or truth but are actually malevolent South African mobs that help these 1600+ international mining companies sack Africa of its mineral wealth by misdiagnosing the majority of mine-related lung diseases as a sexually-transmitted virus. In this way, these mining companies avoid billions of dollars in liability that would otherwise shut down strategic mining operations throughout the African Continent by killing off their dying laborers before they and their impoverished families can sue for compensation.

Because of these revelations, investors who support groups like TAC and AIDSTruth are pressuring other financially-compromised university researchers like Seth Kalichman, Steven Siegelbaum and Cornell’s John Moore to promote the propaganda.

In the latest attack, TAC-funder George Soros directed Jonny Steinberg (one of Soros’ well-paid but scientifically incompetent South African shills) to propagandize AIDS in the pseudoscientific magazine New Scientist. Soros appears to have chosen Steinberg and NS for the same reasons that Gallo picked a security guard to investigate his career in HIV research.

NS’ reporting is so sloppy that when science fiction writer Greg Egan noted its combination of a sensationalist bent and a lack of basic knowledge by its writers, the editor admitted that NS is “an ideas magazine (that writes) about hypotheses as well as theories.” Unfortunately, NS rarely makes that distinction for readers who must speculate about the accuracy of its reports and the qualifications of its guest writers.

Like Nick Kontaratos, Kalichman, Bergman and the rest, Steinberg parrots the milk-fed propaganda – this time blaming the death of Christine Maggiore and her daughter on her scientific skepticism. It was no surprise that the truthers reflexively praised Steinberg – just as Gallo’s esteemed scientists praised Gallo’s security guard.

This incompetence was NOT an “accidental oversight” by NS.

Although the story and shills like Kalichman and truther Nick “Snout” Bennett accused Maggiore of killing her baby (160+ comments now), investigative journalist Liam Scheff posted a comment that NS viewed as unfit for its pages.

Ask yourself what was inappropriate about Scheff’s remarks?

I am wondering why the writer, Jonny Steinberg, focuses on one mother, who may have simply been a bad mother, or someone who didn’t know much about health, instead of focusing on the dozens to hundreds of deaths buried in the AIDS drug Uganda trials?

Or in the death by AIDS drug of tens of thousands of people over the years, as the drugs have been cycled down and down and down in dose, (often to no improvement in health, that is they still kill the patient)? Mr. Steinberg, will you try, for your next article, to contact Jonathan Fishbein, who lost his job and career for blowing the whistle on the NIH fraud in Uganda? Will you talk to the family of Joyce Ann Hafford, who was killed by Nevirapine, or by anyone whose friend or relative died on any AIDS drug?You paint a one-sided picture, and it reeks of pay-for-play. You have no previous articles in New Scientist, and one is left to wonder what your motives are?The political attack arm of the AIDS industry infiltrates media and creates smear campaigns in order to deflect from the hundreds and thousands of tragedies, errors and crimes perpetrated by the AIDS pharma industry, in selling its wares to the public.

Journalism is supposed to serve the public good by putting a light on the dishonesty of institutions. You have uncovered, badly, what was already in public view - a woman with some health issues and many enemies has died. There are sufficient political reasons to think that she was killed, but that question is never raised.

She was hounded by the AIDS pharmaceutical industry, and many prayed loudly and openly for her demise and downfall, and death, for over a decade.What effect will that have on a human body?

I do not have the details necessary to answer the questions of Christine Maggiore’s fitness or lack of fitness as a parent. I would say she was perhaps too zealous or highly naive in taking such a political stand against such a juggernaut.

On the other hand, please see the cases of the tens of thousands who died on high dose AIDS drugs in the 80s and 90s. Please review the Uganda trial. Please review the case of Joyce Ann Hafford, among others, and put some perspective in your histrionic and political article.

Dangerous words indeed.

In this case, NS found it easier to kill Scheff’s comment than admit their magazine posts unproven and unscientific hypotheses and theories.

If HIV/AIDS was a scientific disease, the proof would speak for itself. But as a political disease, US Government agencies like NIAID refer inquiries to AIDSTruth in the land of Apartheid, where the mountains of Africa’s dead miners continue to grow. So much is at stake that hedge fund managers like Soros now pay the offspring of Apartheid to beat the dead woman with her dead child.

The role of the Ford and Tides foundations and Soros Hedge Fund also explains why pro-Soros websites like Huffington, Daily Kos, TruthOut and MoveOn entirely ignore this 30-year controversy and their complicity in the mine-related genocide of Africa’s poorest and most vulnerable people.

Speaker Pelosi has scheduled a vote on the National Energy Tax for this Friday. The Hill Magazine is reporting that this is one of the riskiest moves of her tenure as Speaker. I’d say that the details of the legislation tell us that this is all about the tax increase because it isn’t about the environment:

Democratic aides said leaders had been building up to this decision as they monitored negotiations between Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) over the weekend.

At press time, Waxman and Peterson emerged from a meeting with the Blue Dog Coalition and announced that they reached an agreement. “We have something that I think works for agriculture,” Peterson said.

The crux of the deal is a concession from Waxman to allow the Department of Agriculture, not the Environmental Protection Agency, to develop and monitor offset and land use provisions the legislation creates. Waxman said he would not only retain the votes of the environmentalists, but also gain votes from those who represent the agriculture community.

By giving the Agriculture Department the authority to “develop and monitor offset and land use provisions the legislation creates”, the Democrats are admitting that their primary goal isn’t cleaning up the environment, that it’s really about increasing taxes on people that they don’t agree with. (more…)

Max Baucus and his allies are attempting to shove the most expensive ‘reform’ down our throats. They must be defeated because we can’t afford it. Former Rep. Asa Hutchinson, (R-AR), is skeptical of the single-payer plan:

Former Rep. Asa Hutchinson warned those at the event of the costs of some proposed health care reform bills. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that one bill drafted by Sen. Max Baucus of Montana would cost more than $1.5 trillion to implement.

“They talk about a $1 trillion price tag, and then they try to…tell you they’re not going to raise taxes but will save $1 trillion by increased efficiencies,” Hutchinson said. “Do you all believe that can happen with a government-run program? I don’t think that can happen.”

The Obama administration has already buried us in tons of debt thanks to his budget, the omnibus spending bill and with his stimulus bill. Now he wants to dump several more tons of debt on us for health care reform that will deliver an inferior product to the American people?

Only in Washington, DC could something be called reform when it delivers an inferior product at a higher price. That’s what’s happening here. This isn’t speculation, either. That’s what Rep. Charles Boustany told me about his dealings with the Medicare and Medicaid bureaucracies when he was a heart surgeon.

Another thing that’s guaranteed with any health care bill that Ted Kennedfy or Nancy Pelosi writes: tons of costly mandates. When I interviewed Rep. Paul Ryan, I asked him about the negative impact that government mandates have. Here’s what he said on that: (more…)

Sometimes, House Democrats have the tinniest of tin ears. After reading this post by Philip Klein of the American Spectator, I’m certain we’re looking at a prime example of the Democrats arrogance. Here’s what I’m talking about:

The bill also calls for the creation of a national, government-run insurance exchange, in which individuals would receive government subsidies to purchase either the government plan or chose among government-designed private plans.

The common theme in my interviews with Rep. Charles Boustany and Rep. Paul Ryan was their advocating giving people the option to design their own custom health care policies. That’s why the House Republicans’ plan is titled the Patients’ Choice Act.

This is the biggest philosophical difference between conservatives and progressives. Generally speaking, conservatives want to give people the freedom to choose what works best for them. Generally speaking, progressives think that they have to design policies because people aren’t capable of thinking things through and finding the best solutions.

TRANSLATION: Conservatives trust people and put a high priority on sustaining a high level of personal liberty. On the other hand, progressives trust only wonks, which naturally means that they try controlling everything as much as possible.

QUESTION: What makes progressives think that they know what’s best for me in terms of health care policies?

One of the central themes to Rep. Boustany’s thinking was that the doctor-patient relationship was important in the patient getting the highest quality health care possible. Rep. Boustany said that anytime a DC bureaucrat gets in between a doctor and his patient, there’s cause for concern. He’s absolutely right. That’s precisely when the patient should start worrying. (more…)