Recycle OR ELSE!!!!!

The Logical Husband gets the credit for this find....

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted today to require all businesses and residences to recycle and compost their garbage or face fines, which could lead to a lien on their property.
The ordinance, approved in a 9-2 vote, will force building owners to sign up for the city’s existing composting and recycling programs. The Board will deliver a final vote on the ordinance next week.
"Many tenants want to recycle and compost but the building does not offer the service,” Mayor Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “We're going to change that."

If these tenants are so willing to recycle, why not help them by setting up a way for them to drop it off somewhere? Why do you feel the need to force building owners to do this? Or are you in the business of putting renters out on the street - because that is what will happen if you are serious about putting liens on properties.

Or is this just another one of those unenforceable green mandates put in place to make yourself feel good? If you really were serious about your waste reduction goals, how about working WITH property owners instead of telling them what to do? You might just get a better than expected response if you did.....

Illinois Is #1!

I said this last fall and I still stand uncorrected. The Land of Lincoln has become the Land of "What's in it for me?" politics (HT Ed Morrissey).

As U.S. stock markets plummeted last September, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, sold more than $115,000 worth of stocks and mutual-fund shares and used much of the money to invest in Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

The Illinois senator's 2008 financial disclosure statement shows he sold mutual-fund shares worth $42,696 on Sept. 19, the day after then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke urged congressional leaders in a closed meeting to craft legislation to help financially troubled banks. The same day, he bought $43,562 worth of Berkshire Hathaway's Class B stock, the disclosure shows.

Emphasis mine. If you or I had done something like this, we would be in jail for engaging in insider trading. However, since the Democrats have drained the swamp on the culture of corruption, I'm sure we will see the investigation into this any day now.....right?????

Seriously, Ed asks a very valid question when he asks....

Durbin’s spokesman says that the September meeting revealed nothing of an insider nature, and that Durbin traded along with the market as the storm clouds gathered. I wonder if the SEC would consider that a compelling alibi if it had been a Wall Street regulator who met with Paulson and traded like this the next day. The Democrats in Congress would be screaming for his head in the latter example, but will surely remain silent as the graveyard about Durbin’s suspicious trading.

It's nice to know, as long as I have been away from Illinois, that some things are constant - like corrupt politicians.

Have We Learned NOTHING?

I have to shake my head in sheer disbelief. After 16 months of listening to whisper campaigns against Hillary (during the "Democratic" Primary) and Sarah during the general election, we are now starting to see the whispers against another ambitious woman politician - Minnesota's Laura Brod. The comments first started showing up on conservative leaning blogs within the past week. While the blog owners rightly pulled the comments down, it was not done before lefty blogs picked up on the allegations and ran with them. Shawn Towle at Check's and Balances ran with it as did AAA at Residual Forces (after digging into Towle's allegations to try to disprove them. AAA's post was filled with a lot of "various sources told me" type comments that led a lot of people to complain and in the end AAA pulled the post. However, one lefty blogger saved a copy of the post and posted it at his site. In all of the comments that were made about the situation (at RF anyway) not ONE COMMENTER had the dignity to condemn the rumor mongers. Not here - right here right now I join with the blogger at Change We Must Fight For in saying what needs to be said....

Before I go any further, I am in no way condoning these comments. In fact, I find them to be cowardly, childish, and completely against the values of either political party. Whether the comments are true or not, hiding behind false identities and performing drive by smears should never be tolerated.

Thus, I am calling these individuals out, I am daring them to comment on my blog. They either need to fess up or shut up.

I may not agree with Rep. Laura Brod, but I do respect her enough to put my name behind everything I write about her. She does not deserve the smears she’s receiving by the likes of these people.

They need to stand up and be accountable for their actions.

They need to show us they are people with courage and not cowardice.

Left or right, I don't care....who EVER is spreading these rumors about Representative Brod are the lowest of low - the slimiest of slime and they deserve to be brought forward and suffer the consequences of their actions....and if the slime mongers are indeed supporters or agents of another Republican candidate for Governor, I hope that the candidate will kick those people OUT of the campaign and that he will denounce those scurrilous allegations loudly and publically. It is the correct thing to do!

Health Care Rationing

Long time readers of this site know that my biggest concerns about a "universal" government run health care plan center around the very real possibility of health care rationing. That concern is, in large part due to the circumstances surrounding the health of my 73 year old mother. The Logical Mother has (among other conditions) a weak immune system, rheumatoid arthritis, no thyroid, a bad heart, bad circulation and myriad of other ailments large and small. Four years ago, due to an undiagnosed electrolyte imbalance, she collapsed in her home. She lived alone and my sister (who lives nearby) was out of town when it happened. She had just moved into this home and I had no phone numbers for neighbors when it happened. When my sister and brother in law found her, she was hours from death. It was only due to the heroic efforts of the EMTs and the phenomenonal staff at Alexian Brothers Hospital in Hoffman Estates IL that she is alive today. Based on what President Obama said last Wednesday night - she would have been allowed to DIE THAT DAY under his vision of health care reform. After her collapse, my mother spent the next year and a half in the hospital trying to figure out the cause of her collapse and the many others that followed. We moved her into an assisted living facility annd it was there that a cut on her foot got infected with a MRSA infection. After weeks of fruitless treatments, her doctors went out on a limb and prescribed a long series of treatments that included heavy doses of antibiotics and treatment in a hyperbaric chamber. After 9 weeks of some pretty grueling (for a clausterphobic) treatments, the infection was cleared up and the blackouts, borderline dementia and heart issues that were unrelated to her heart blockage she is healthy (for a 73 year old with rheumatoid arthritis) and talking about travelling - something that 5 years ago would not have been discussed. Again - none of this would have been possible in a Canada Care/Britian care type system that lacks neo-natal ICU beds and mandates that only women between the ages of 39 and a half and 40 are eligible for in-vitro fertilization treatment (among other odd restrictions).

President Obama, last Wednesday night said that we needed to face the reality that we can not treat everyone for everything that sometimes "heroic" measures need to be stopped. Even my mother, a STAUNCH Obama supporter and former health care worker, realizes that his health care plan would have meant that she would not be around today...and she is not fond of that idea at all.

Dissent Is Patriotic But Only....

Once upon a time, dissent (from the President's policies) was the HEIGHT of patriotism. Leftists across the country assured those on the right that they didn't hate the country - they just disagreed with President Bush. Well now that the shoe is on the other foot, we start to see that maybe they didn't believe that as much as they claimed to have.

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

It is good to know that the people who were so demanding that we conservatives be "tolerant" of others opinions are so tolerant of other opinions themselves. I have no doubt that this will be remembered the next time that there is a majority change in the Government.

Open Primary?

Last week, the Deseret News ran a very interesting column on the pros and cons of the open primary. As someone who grew up in a primary state and who spent the last 15 years in a caucus state, count me as being squarely in the caucus camp and here is why....

Lavarr Webb brings up the obvious cons of an open primary system - out of control 3rd party special interest ads, cronyism run amok (what you have here and now is no where NEAR what it would be in a primary system) and the perrenial rule of incumbents with name recognition that no amount of money can buy, but oh the money that name recognition draws. What he doesn't tell you is that the same con that Frank Pignelli uses against the caucus system is one of the same cons of the primary system. You still only have about 3000-4000 people deciding who will be the nominee....the ones who bother to show up to vote in the primary! The biggest "pro" caucus argument that I can give is how EASY it is to get involved. All you have to do is SHOW UP on caucus night. Once you show up, decide how far "up" you want to go and odds are, you will get there. You want to go to the state convention to decide who runs for Senate, come to caucus and run for a delegate position! It's that simple!

Mr. Pignelli starts off his argument against the caucus system with a contradiction. He starts off stating that "Powerful incumbents are shifting their focus of attention to those who will determine their fate: 3,000 or so current and potential delegates that will attend the Utah Republican convention in June 2010. History demonstrates millions will be spent to influence this small universe of activists, a fact LaVarr ignores." and then he turns around and uses the Chaffetz/Cannon race in 2008 as his example. The problem is that the Chaffetz/Cannon race shows the exact opposite. Representative Cannon had a 6-1 campaign warchest advantage over the neophyte Chaffetz. All Jason Chaffetz had was drive, determination and a cadre of dedicated volunteers to help him overcome a HUGE disadvantage and they did it. Come to think of it, he reminds me of another outsider who overcame a huge monitary and name recognition deficit who became one of the progressive movements patron saints - Paul David Wellstone!

Mr. Pignelli calls the caucus system "an archaic throwback to the early 20th century." What he misses though is that the caucus system is also the most "progressive" system. It is there that a virtual unknown who has a vision and the will to push him or herself to the limit can succeed. It is the ultimate equalizer when you have an incumbent who is suffering from a severe case of DC-itis.

I can think of no better outlet for the average Joe or Jane Voter who cares about who represents them to truly have their say than in a caucus state. For you never know when or where the next Jason Chaffetz or Paul Wellstone will show up - but boy when he or she does the excitement that this person brings to to electorate is almost always ELECTRIC!

Legislative Malfeasance

Once again our US House of Representatives voted on a bill that NO ONE EVER HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO READ, just as they had done on the "stimulus" bill. The chairman of the Energy Committee, Henry Waxman, even threw in a 300 page amendment at 3am on the day that they voted on the bill and when some legislators had the nerve to ask for a copy of the bill to read, they were told "it's here somewhere!"

I just have one question for the defenders of the actions of the House Leadership - if these bills are so good, why can't the House abide by their own rules (and their President's rule) and post the bill for 72 hours on their website before the vote? Are they so afraid of the voters that they can not handle a little criticism?

Bring In The Stunt Groom

So today was a very busy outside of the house day. Most of our gardening done and the Junior Logician is off visiting his grandmother so the Logical Husband and I spent most of the day at the farmers market and walking the dogs and taking pictures of the capital area and basically just enjoying an absolutely splendid early summer day in Utah. As a result, I didn't get to any of my emails until very late today. One of the daily must reads is my electronic version of the New York Times. They honestly do have some decent stories....unless they are reporting on President Obama and then the love fest starts.

It was a bit like planning the dream wedding only to have a hurricane rip away the chapel roof as you make your way down the aisle. ABC News and the White House probably thought they had scored a coup in arranging “Questions for the President: Prescription for America,” a prime-time opportunity (with a followup session on “Nightline”) for Barack Obama to explain his health care proposal to the voters and for ABC to monopolize an hour-plus with the most famous man in the world. And then came Iran. And Mark Sanford.

Wait - Mark Sanford??? The story broke on Sanford before the President's hour long market re-rollout (because the program has been out for a while now). If he had mentioned the latest trio of celebrity deaths (Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson) I could maybe see making a case for it. But then again how could the "most famous man in the world" be overshadowed by a mere electon or a couple of celebrity deaths.

And, well, there was the fact that it was about health care reform. The result: the 10 p.m. show drew 4.7 million viewers, or nearly 3 million fewer than a competing repeat of CBS’s “CSI: New York” and less than half what the evening’s top draw, NBC’s “America’s Got Talent,” attracted in the previous hour. Well, could the president’s plan have got a second-day bump at America’s water coolers? Not likely.

Oh OK - there are the obligatory references to Farrah and MJ...Oh course there is no mention of the real news like the pending vote on Cap and Trade but then again who cares about climate change...RIGHT????

So who did tune in? Certainly more than a few people who are simply curious or worried about the future of their insurance plans, as well as a few us who are paid to pay attention and, of course, bloggers, who are simply masochists for this kind of thing.

Not this blogger - I was engaged in my weekly Wednesday volunteer activity with 4H. However, the Opiniator was gracious enough to provide us with a wrap up of the blogosphere's reaction to the whole thing. After quoting the ABC chief and the Business and Media Institute's reactions to it, the Opinator gets to the meat/light supper/salad of the reactions.....

Scarecrow at FireDogLake’s Oxdown Gazette, however, thinks the network lured the president into a devilish trap:

For its part, ABC insisted on having Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer, instead of informed, qualified health care experts, guide the conversation. That was a mistake, but not the worst of ABC’s offensive conduct.

Sawyer’s main contribution was to introduce her own uninformed biases/opinions in framing issues and introducing questioners. Gibson’s primary role was to reveal his own misconceptions and then literally read talking points from a Republican letter — an obvious ransom extracted after days of Republican whining about giving the President air time on a critical public issue.

Gibson’s other role was to interrupt the President every few minutes to announce a commercial break. The all too frequent commercial interruptions served as an apt metaphor for how private commercial interests demand our attention and extract their profits while limiting our ability to discuss critical public policy issues.

Emphasis mine...Damn those pesky commercial breaks! Maybe Scarecrow would have been happier if Donald Trump had just purchased this hour instead of "buying" Monday Night Raw - then he could have run it commercial free (as he did last Monday night). Then we could treated to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson starting the hour with the intro "Can you SMELL what Barack is cookin'?" Then all Charlie and Diane would need to worry about doing is bowing in proper deference to the President lest they suffer a three count and be "traded" to MSNBC.

The Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik thinks the problem wasn’t the message, but the medium:

Let’s make one thing clear right from the start: ABC News did not give President Barack Obama a free pass in its prime-time special Wednesday night to sell his plan for a radical overhaul of the health care system.

There were people in the town hall setting who asked pointed questions, and if you listened very closely, it was obvious after a while that Obama did not have any very good answers when it came to specifics. Furthermore, anchorman Charles Gibson, who moderated the discussion, asked solid follow-up questions of the president.

But, ultimately none of that mattered much, because the majority of viewers can’t or don’t listen very closely when such vast amounts of information, opinion and statistics are thrown around as they were Wednesday night on ABC. Television does not work like that. In the manner that TV does work, Obama had his way from early morning to latenight on ABC Wednesday to push his agenda for massive social change on healthcare. In short, he owned ABC’s airwaves.

Zurawick is correct in that the media was part of the problem but I don't think he gets the "why". Most people turn on the television to tune out. With few exceptions (like political junkies) people use television to escape their daily lives - that's one reason why the moniker "the idiot box" has been used to describe the media almost from day 1.

The Opinionator then quotes Jake Tapper's and my dear friend Ed Morrissey's posts on the subject as well as a response to Ed from Pete Able at the Moderate Voice (for the record I do think calling that exchange Obama's "Dukakis moment" was a bit of a stretch Ed). He also quoted a rather common sense proposal from Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz....

We should create a legal requirement that political elites have to use the same system they foist on everyone else. They should have to wait for hours in doctors’ offices. They should have to wait weeks or months for tests. They should be fobbed off on emergency rooms if they get sick over the weekend. They should be denied any Hail Mary test, medication or procedure. They should get the entire politically-managed health-care experience.

This standard should extend to all elected officials, political appointees and their immediate families.

Such a law would create a built-in feedback loop that would prevent politicians from ignoring the health of the people.

However, the common sense quote of the piece comes from my BTRadio partner in punditry Jazz Shaw (again at the Moderate Voice).

The President once again trotted out the same quote I’ve heard repeatedly when he’s been asked about competition in the private industry. He wants to be “absolutely clear” that if you have a health plan you like, you can keep it! Of course you can keep it. But will you? If your current plan through your employer costs you a couple hundred dollars per month, like mine does, and suddenly there’s a government run plan available that promises roughly the same level of coverage for one hundred bucks per month, how many of you will stay with your old plan? I don’t see why I would. I’d like to save more than one thousand dollars per year, wouldn’t you? Sounds great, but then what happens to this huge industry and all of its various employees when most of us bail out? Is American health insurance, as an industry, too big to fail?

That is something that Jazz and I discussed on our show last Wednesday because that IS the million dollar question. IF the "public option" is so much cheaper than the private option to the point where Americans dump their private insurance en masse will we then have to bail out the insurance industry the way we bailed out the automobile industry or the financial industry? I understand that not all of those employees of the current insurance industry will probably not lose their jobs, but easily one half will and those that don't lose their jobs will grossly under-employed. What will THAT do to our economy? What kinds of jobs will President Obama "create" to replace the lost insurance industry jobs? More fast food jobs? More road repair jobs? The people that are losing these insurance jobs are not people who can repair roads or dig trenches.....and that is the dirty little secret of government job creation. It is a secret that NO POLITICIAN will tell you - but anyone who has worked in a government job, knows exactly what I am talking about.....

Climate Change - A Historical Timeline.

We had quite the spirited debate in my last post on "climate change" and during that debate I brought up a point that is often ignored by the global climate change alarmists.

Richard - some scientific "facts" to lay on ya...

Fact 1) at one time during early history of the Earth, much of the upper Midwest was covered in VAST SHEETS OF ICE. What caused them to melt? Global climate change....

Fact 2) at one time during the early history of the Earth the Salt Lake Valley was covered by the ocean - we have a remnant of that with us today in the form of the Great Salt Lake. What caused THAT ocean to recede and evaporate? Global Climate change!

Global climate change is real but as the previous two examples SCIENTIFICALLY PROVE mankind has nothing to do with it. There were NO coal-fired power plants, no SUV's, mega-opolis' full of people then. Just a living changing planet that circles a living changing sun.

Well my good friend Gary Gross sent me a graphic today that not only illustrates the previous cycles, it also documents what really caused all of the climate change (and it was not SUVs or factories....)



If you look at the far right on the graphic you can see that the last trend of global "warming" actually peaked in 1998 and we are now at the bottom (so far) of this latest cooling trend. We saw SNOW in Minnesota and Canada as late as June this year and as far south as NEW ORLEANS LA as this picture from January of this year indicates.



That does not mean that we should stop all efforts to reduce the amount of pollutants that we are putting into the air. But it does mean that we do not have to take the extremely draconian measures that are outlined in the misguided Cap and Trade bill that was just passed by the House. Our three Utah Representatives were all quite right to vote against this bill.

Grilling Bernanke

The New York Time takes a lot of heat (quite rightly) for editorializing news stories. However, today they deserve a lot of kudos for for watching the sausage being ground - one of their reporters live blogged the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee testimony of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on the Fed's involvement in Bank Of America's take-over of Merrill Lynch. For those that don't know why this is an issue, the best thing to do is scroll to the bottom and read the preview first...

Mr. Bernanke has come under heavy criticism for his handling of Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch. The House committee is investigating how the deal turned into an enormous second bailout of Bank of America and Merrill, and lawmakers are examining how Mr. Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. pushed the bank to complete the transaction after it discovered billions of dollars in additional losses at the securities firm.

Bank of America’s chief executive, Kenneth D. Lewis, told the committee earlier this month that federal officials had pressured him to go through with the Merrill deal and acknowledged that his job had been at risk if he did not.

Mr. Paulson is expected to give the committee his side of the story next month.

The House investigation is heavily colored by partisanship. President Obama is seeking formidable new powers for the Fed to regulate giant institutions, including Bank of America, that could pose risks to the financial system.

Republicans, along with some Democrats, argue that the Fed already has too much power.

The apparent point of contention (in the hearing) was pressure that BOA CEO Lewis says that the Fed exerted on them when they talked about exercising the merger agreements "material adverse effect" or MAC clause. I'm not going to relay the whole thing - you are going to have to go to the NYTimes website to read it all but I wanted to highlight a couple of specific questions.

10:39 a.m. | More on the MAC: Was the MAC clause in the Merrill deal just a “bargaining chip” that Mr. Lewis used to get federal assistance? That’s what Mr. Issa asks Mr. Bernanke, who replies that, in his view, the MAC could not have been invoked to cancel the deal, and if it were invoked, it would have caused a near-collapse of the financial system.

So in otherwords, yes it probably was. I have no doubt that if the Fed believed that invoking the MAC would cause a "near-collapse" of the economy that they relayed that information to Mr. Lewis.

10:50 a.m. | ‘Was Mr. Paulson Lying?’: There’s a blunt question from Dan Burton of Indiana, who wants to know if Mr. Paulson was lying when he testified that Mr. Bernanke told him to threaten BofA’s board and management if the bank tried to walk away from the Merrill deal. “I didn’t tell him anything like that,” Mr. Bernanke says.

Asked about a conversation with Jeffrey Lacker, another Fed official, Mr. Bernanke says he can’t remember the details. In summarizing the conversation in an e-mail, Mr. Lacker has said Mr. Bernanke was going to make it clear that BofA’s management would be gone if they tried to invoke the MAC.

Ouch - that is going to sting.

Utah's own Jason Chaffetz asked a very interesting question...

11:12 a.m | What Makes a Threat?: As with the previous hearing starring Mr. Lewis, there is plenty of discussion today about whether or not threats were made to keep the Merrill-BofA deal intact. Jason Chaffetz of Utah wants to know how Mr. Bernanke’s questioning of Mr. Lewis’ management and judgment could not be perceived as a threat.

Mr. Bernanke tells him that the Fed did not control Mr. Lewis’ destiny. If he had decided to invoke the MAC “and the company had prospered. we would not have the basis to do anything,” he says.

I would be interested to know how Mr. Bernanke would feel if the shoe were on the other foot. Would he have "assumed" that the Fed's had no "basis" to punish him or not? I would venture to guess the answer is "NOT"....

While there was a couple of dips into the conspiracy theory pool (see Marcy Kaptur's non-question at the 11:28am mark) there were a lot of very indept probing questions including this one by Peter Welch of Vermont...

12:17 p.m. | Too Big to Exist?: Peter Welch of Vermont ask whether institutions that are too big to fail should “be too big to exist.” Mr. Bernanke said that it was legitimate to discuss that possibility, but that big banks had an economic role and businesses around the world.

and this one by Dennis Kucinich of Ohio...

1:02 p.m. | What About Those Losses?: Mr. Kucinich continues to believe that Bank of America knew about the losses in mid-November. He also asks if the Fed knew about the losses before it approved the deal at the end of the November, even though the central bank was getting daily updates of Merrill’s financial condition. Mr. Bernanke replied, “We didn’t know about the $14 billion.”

“It’s difficult to know what these valuations are unless they are done by professional asset managers,” he said.

Overall this exercise (by the NYTimes) was well worth it as they provided the country with an insight into the mechaniations that take place in DC. The more light that is shone on how legislation gets done (in DC or in the state capitals) the better it is for ALL citizens. For the more we know about how political business gets done, the more educated the voters will be when they next go into the voting booth - and that is a very good thing!

Of Ganders And Geese

So last night was the ObamaCare infomercial. I didn't watch it last night as we had dog training, but ABC News has an interesting story up today about one of the key exchanges in the townhall portion of the event. (HT HA)

President Obama struggled to explain today whether his health care reform proposals would force normal Americans to make sacrifices that wealthier, more powerful people -- like the president himself -- wouldn't face.

The probing questions came from two skeptical neurologists during ABC News' special on health care reform, "Questions for the President: Prescription for America," anchored from the White House by Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson.

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.

Emphasis mine. We all want the best of care for our families Mr. President. That is why so MANY of us have been fighting the nationalization of our health care system. We want our local doctors to be the ones to make the decisions - not a bureaucrat in DC. That local doctor will know what is best for the patient while the bureaucrat in DC will not. It's that simple.

Final Day

Today is the final day of the Move America Forward "Troopathon". If you have not done so, now would be a perfect time to buy a care package for our soldiers overseas. The link in my sidebar will take you out to the donations page where you can buy a care package and help Team Hot Air (or any of the other teams competing in the Blogger Competition).