By Alan Caruba
Try to imagine a
commission of the U.S. government recommending that it get rid of the
Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, countless
agencies, and, for good measure, restructure Medicare so it doesn’t go broke.
There are few Americans who will argue that our federal government isn’t big
enough and many who trace our present problems to Big Government.
That is why what
has been occurring in Australia caught my attention because its voters rid
themselves of a political party that imposed both a carbon tax and renewable
energy tax on them. The purpose of the latter was to fund the building of wind
turbines and solar farms to provide electricity.
Taxing carbon
emissions—greenhouse gases—said to be heating the Earth has happily died in the
U.S. Senate, but in Australia the taxes were a major reason that the Liberal
Party (which is actually politically conservative despite its name) took power
after a former Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, pushed it and the renewable
energy tax through its parliament.
Gillard became
the first woman PM after she challenged then PM Kevin Rudd to lead the Labor
Party (which is politically liberal.) Like John Kerry, Gillard was against the
taxes before she was for them. How liberal is Rudd? In February he was named a
senior fellow of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Like Obama,
Rudd came out in favor of same-sex marriage when he was the PM.
Bjorn Lomborg,
writing in The Australian in late
April, noted that both of the taxes “have contributed to household electricity
costs rising 110 percent in the past five years, hitting the poor the hardest.”
I repeat—110 percent!
By Alan Caruba
I suppose that
throughout history men and women have asked themselves if they were living
through either the worst or best of times. The times between wars are most
surely the best of times and the times leading up to and during a war qualify
as the worst. They are, however, rather quickly forgotten. It only takes about
two generations—sometimes less—to move on from such events.
May 8, is “VE
Day” celebrating the U.S. victory in Europe in World War Two. I suspect that
most of our younger generations, including some of the Boomers, have no idea
what the “VE” stands for.
World War Two
ended seven decades ago, but not only have most Americans moved on from the
horror of September 11, 2001, but it would appear that even the killing of an
American ambassador and three security personnel in Benghazi, Libya on
September 11, 2012 doesn’t arouse much anger even as we learn of a White House
cover-up that utterly debases their sacrifice and loss. “Dude, that was two
years ago,” said one White House staff member; as crass and crude a dismissal
as one can imagine.
From a
perspective of more than seventy and a half years, my mind flashes back to the
Watergate scandal that began in June 1972 and concluded with President Nixon’s
resignation in August 1974. That was a long two years as the attending events
unfolded.
Forty-three
people in the Nixon administration went to jail for their participation in the
cover-up. The current Attorney General received a Contempt of Congress citation
for his failure to provide information about one of the administration’s many
scandals and during a recent speech to the National Action Network, a group
founded by Rev. Al Sharpton, asked “What Attorney General has ever had to deal
with that kind of treatment?” Does the name John Mitchell ring a bell? He was
Nixon’s Attorney General……..
By Alan Caruba
The continuing
drama of a President willing to lie about the climate continues with the
release of a report, the National Climate Assessment. It is a repeat of all the
lies that have been generated by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change.
“The climate
report,” said Dan Kish, a Senior Vice President of the Institute for Energy
Research, “bears a strong resemblance to the IPCC report, only with less
science and more rhetoric.” It is “just another attempt to justify more
government intervention in American’s lives and more attacks on affordable
energy and economic growth.”
Like Obamacare,
the new report is, said Kish, “intentionally confusing and misleading.”
“Throughout his
entire presidency,” said Kish, “Obama has promoted policies that have
discouraged the use of our vast energy resources, including blocking the
Keystone XL pipeline, slowing energy development on government lands and water,
and forcing new restrictions on all forms of energy that Americans have used to
become the number one economy in the world. Under this administration, even
cows are not spared as emission sources that must be controlled in Washington.”
Marlo Lewis, a
Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writing on Fox News,
identified the political agenda of the climate report “designed to scare people
and build political support for unpopular policies such as carbon taxes,
cap-and-trade, and EPA regulatory mandates.” Item by item, he noted the lies
put forth by the report.
The American
Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity responded to the latest climate report in
a comparable, direct manner. Laura Sheehan, a Senior Vice President of the
ACCCE, said, “Instead of flying his cabinet members around the world, President
Obama and his deputies should take time to visit communities impacted by a much
more dangerous threat; this administration’s costly regulatory crusade.”
By Alan Caruba
We have been
witnessing a growing assault on free speech in America by the Left and too
often it is succeeding.
The demand by
members of the Rutgers University faculty that former Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice be disinvited to be the commencement speaker is the latest
example and her decision to withdraw, while graceful, was a victory for the
Left, the liberals for whom free speech exists only if it agrees with their
posturing about equality, diversity, and all forms of “justice” as defined only
by them.
Our universities
are showing ugly signs of censoring the speech of those they invited to give a
speech! Brandeis University recently withdrew its invitation to Ayaan Hirsi
Ali, a human rights campaigner, because of her criticisms of Islam. In response,
she said of the slur on her reputation that, “More deplorable is that an
institution set up on the basis of religious freedom should today so deeply
betray its own founding principles.”
The forced
resignation of the co-founder and CEO of Mozilla, Brendan Eich, because, years
before, he had made a donation to the California campaign to support
traditional marriage is another example. The Left has led the effort to
redefine this ancient institution of the union between a man and a woman while
supporting the demands of the nation’s gay and lesbian community.
Tearing down the
foundations of our society has long been a major goal of the Left.
The taping of a
private conversation between Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles
Clippers, and his mixed-race mistress who made it public led almost immediately
thereafter to the demand by the National Basketball Association that he divest
himself of ownership of the team. Yes, Sterling expressed racist views, but
free speech includes saying stupid things; things that are sure to offend
someone or some group. Saying them privately is very different from saying them
publicly. And that speech is protected by the First Amendment……
By Alan Caruba
It tells you
everything you need to know about the utter contempt those in the White House
and the circles of power that the announcement of 0.01% economic growth thus
far this year was blamed on—wait for it—the weather! Specifically, a cold
winter.
If you have been
paying any attention of late, the weather and the climate have become the
reason for everything in general and
for tornadoes, floods and forest fires, in particular. The fact that these
natural events have always been subject to whatever the weather is or the
larger climate trends seems to have escaped the notice of too many people. If
winter automatically drives down the economy to a point of invisibility, that
is news to me.
I’m surprised
some economist hasn’t blamed winter for the major decline in home ownership. It
has hit its lowest level since the mid-1990s according to the Census Bureau. As
the Wall Street Journal reported, “despite two years of recovery in the housing
market there are still fewer homeowners than there were before the recession.”
Oh? The recession is over? You could have fooled me.
It is no
surprise, however, that China is poised to pass the United States as the
world’s leading economic power this year. The U.S. has been the global leader since
1872 when it replaced the United Kingdom and now “most economists previously
thought China would pull ahead in 2019 according to the Financial Times.
Bear in mind
that the U.S. has survived financial crises in the past, but the 2008 meltdown
has persisted since around January 20, 2009 when a new President was sworn into
office. It didn’t take him long to receive a Nobel Peace Prize that year and to
preside over the first reduction in the nation’s top ranked credit rating in
2011.
Could the economic
decline have something to do with the insane increase of federal government
regulation? As John Merline asked in Investor’s Business Daily, “After years of rapid growth during the Obama
administration, the cost of federal regulations is now bigger than the entire
economics of all but nine countries in the world.” He was reporting on the
annual report. “Ten Thousands Commandments”, issued by the Competitive
Enterprise Institute. Compiled by Clyde Wayne Crews, this year’s report found
that the “regulation tax” imposed on the economy now tops $1.86 trillion. “By
comparison, Canada’s entire GDP is $1.82 trillion and India’s is $1.84
trillion.”
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