As the promise of Universal Healthcare continues to be sold to the American public by Democrats, the anecdotes fly. Look here; a case failure of our healthcare system! Look there; another person falls through the cracks!

The problem is, it’s the big picture that continues to put the lie to the selling of socialized medicine. As I’ve noted before, the system in Oregon will deny cancer patients life-saving or -extending medicine, but will gladly pay for life-ending “treatment”. You can decry all you want the profit motive of the private enterprise system, but with socialized medicine the profit motive is just as motivating, with a bigger bureaucracy larger than any insurance company you can name calling the shots.

And as Christians, is this the kind of system that we want to be encouraging? We’d have rationed healthcare (all socialized systems wind up here, sooner or later), equally poor quality, and a respect for life on par with Oregon’s.

But hey, it would be “equal”. Wonderful.

This bit of “hope” and “change”, however, has already been done on this scale. And how has it worked? Let’s talk to one of the founding fathers.

Back in the 1960s, [Claude] Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: “the father of Quebec medicare.” Even this title seems modest; Castonguay’s work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.”

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

Read the rest of this entry

Mr Obama is (rightly) demonized by the pro-life writers for saying,

Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old,” he said. “I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”

Hmm. Now I’ve two remarks to add to the fray on that. I wonder if this was on his mind, was he also (in subtext) offering:

I don’t want to be punished with a grandchild (for my failure to teach them morals and values) .

For after all, that is also in the mix. And in any sane family arrangement, if your child becomes a pre-teen mom … it is likely grandma and yourself who will be bearing a large part of the child-rearing until your child is ready and on her feet in her life’s journey. That could take a decade or more. This responsibility of course, would negatively impact the time he has available for raising his children … and to be honest I’d question sharing the time commitment of raising two children well with that required for running for President (and also being one).  So one might ask, “When are you going to teach them about values and morals?”

One also wonders, how removing consequences for actions “teaches morals and values”. Nerfing the world, removing all consequences from our choice is the pivot point for what this view of abortion. Declare non-human and outside that sector of society (the unborn) and we don’t have to deal with the consequences yet another sector of our choices. Great.

And to stave off at least one line or argument recall Mr Obama fully supports late term abortion which is certainly inside everyone’s notion of fetus as having a right to life, after all if one induced labor and brought it to term … the child would live without extreme measures to sustain life required. Mr Obama after all signed on to legislature trying require hospital staff to kill any children “which accidentally are delivered alive.” One wonders how he contrasts that with his exegesis of the parable of the Good Samaritan.

…masquerading as "cause and effect".  Meryl Yourish notes that the Associated Press is making yet another truce-breaking mortar barrage by the Palestinians sound like Israel’s fault.

Notice the order of the events in the paragraphs. Israel closed the crossings, and THEN the Palestinians fired rockets. The AP is framing the situation as an Israeli cause—”refusing” to open the crossings—and a Palestinian effect—firing rockets and mortars. As if those are the natural progression. What the AP is no longer doing is calling the rocket fire a violation of the truce. The Israeli refusal to open the crossings is following the terms of the truce, which the AP knows full well, having published many articles detailing the truce. First, the attacks were supposed to stop. Then Israel would send more goods into Gaza. If three days went by without an attack, more goods would go in. Since the Palestinians are violating the truce, Israel is doing exactly as was agreed, and not sending in more goods or opening the crossings. But the AP is not reporting this honestly. The news service is trying to make its readers think that Israel is violating the truce by “refusing” to open the crossings.

Meryl has been taking aim, almost daily, at the misleading and biased reporting by the AP on this topic for quite some time.  It’s a target-rich environment.

[tags]Israel,Palestinians,Gaza,Hamas,liberal media bias[/tags]

Your taxpayer dollars at work.  Michelle Malkin has the story.

If you don’t know what ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is all about, you better bone up. This left-wing group takes in 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers — you and me — and has leveraged nearly four decades of government subsidies to fund affiliates that promote the welfare state and undermine capitalism and self-reliance, some of which have been implicated in perpetuating illegal immigration and encouraging voter fraud. A new whistleblower report from the Consumer Rights League claims that Chicago-based ACORN has commingled public tax dollars with political projects. Who in Washington will fight to ensure that your money isn’t being spent on these radical activities?

OK, so why should you care that a "community organization" out of Chicago plays dirty politics?  A real yawner, right?  What’s next, reporting that the sky is blue? 

Malkin gives you a reason to care, by noting who in particular probably won’t be doing any fighting.

Don’t bother asking Barack Obama. He cut his ideological teeth working with ACORN as a "community organizer" and legal representative. Naturally, ACORN’s political action committee has warmly endorsed his presidential candidacy. ACORN head Maude Hurd gushes that Obama is the candidate who "best understands and can affect change on the issues ACORN cares about" — like ensuring their massive pipeline to your hard-earned money.

Malkin continues with details of voter fraud (pending cases, but also the largest case in Washington state where they were convicted), using federal housing money for electioneering, and mortgage advice that would land them in jail if they were a lender in today’s market. 

Stanley Kurtz has an article with even more details of ACORN’s methods ("in your face", Code-Pink-type confrontation), it’s political aims (socialist), and Obama’s ties to the organization (a lot deeper than we were first led to believe).  If you want to flesh out Obam’s highly-vaunted "community organizer" credentials, you need to read Kurtz’s peek into ACORN.  A small excerpt:

To understand the nature and extent of Acorn’s radicalism, an excellent place to begin is Sol Stern’s 2003 City Journal article, “ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities.” (For a shorter but helpful piece, try Steven Malanga’s “Acorn Squash.”)
Sol Stern explains that Acorn is the key modern successor of the radical 1960’s “New Left,” with a “1960’s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism” to match. Acorn, says Stern, grew out of “one of the New Left’s silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization.” In the 1960’s, NWRO launched a campaign of sit-ins and disruptions at welfare offices. The goal was to remove eligibility restrictions, and thus effectively flood welfare rolls with so many clients that the system would burst. The theory, explains Stern, was that an impossibly overburdened welfare system would force “a radical reconstruction of America’s unjust capitalist economy.” Instead of a socialist utopia, however, we got the culture of dependency and family breakdown that ate away at America’s inner cities — until welfare reform began to turn the tide.

Being a "community organizer" may sound like a refreshing thing to have on a presidential candidate’s resume, but, as with most things, it all depends on what one was organizing for. 

For another peek into ACORN, here’s an article from a guy who was gung-ho about the group itself.  Well, until he actually joined it.

So now, after Wright and Pfleger and Ayers and all the other people he kept company with but has thrown under the bus, is ACORN next?  He could pull out his standard line, "this is not the ACORN I knew", but that excuse is wearing rather thin. 

If he doesn’t distance himself from a group he worked for for 3 1/2 years, then his radical leftist views will be all the more evident.  If he does back away (and if he can do that for his pastor of 20 years, ACORN is fair game), then he continues to show himself to be a man who either has made very poor decisions all of his life, or shows himself to be cravenly and politically expedient when dealing with his inconvenient past.  Either way, he shows himself to be someone we don’t want in the Oval Office.

[tags]ACORN,Barack Obama,community organizer,Chicago,socialism,Sol Stern[/tags]

While other Christian groups and denominations may have doctrinal issues with the Latter-day Saints, they do line up on a number of political issues.

SALT LAKE CITY – The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is asking California members to join the effort to amend that state’s constitution to define marriage as being between a man and a woman.

A letter sent to Mormon bishops and signed by church president Thomas S. Monson and his two top counselors calls on Mormons to donate "means and time" to the ballot measure. A note on the letter dated June 20 says it should be read during church services on June 29, but the letter was published Saturday on several Web sites.

Church spokesman Scott Trotter said Monday that the letter was authentic. He declined further comment, saying the letter explains the church’s reasons for getting involved.

The LDS church will work with a coalition of churches and other conservative groups that put the California Marriage Protection Act on the Nov. 4 ballot to assure its passage, the letter states.

In May, California’s Supreme Court overturned a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage, saying gays could not be denied marriage licenses.

"The church’s teachings and position on this moral issue are unequivocal. Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and the formation of families is central to the Creator’s plan for His children," the four-paragraph letter states.

Mormons say they have 750,000 member in California, who could have a big impact.

What’s not clear in all of this, regardless of the addition of the Mormons to the fray, is how California will deal with the genie they’ve already let out of the bottle; what to do with marriage licenses that the amendment would directly affect.  This quandary, brought to you by Judicial Activism(tm), is the result of liberals in government not letting the legislative process do its work and trying to usurp it.  Some complained here in Georgia that the constitutional amendment that passed here was unnecessary since we already had a law against same-sex marriage.  The California situation is a prime object lesson for why that argument was, at least, disingenuous. 

[tags]California,Latter-Day Saints,Mormons,same-sex marriage[/tags]

Learned by Josh Marshall, lefty blogger at Talking Points Memo. First, he starts out the post being inspired.

I happened yesterday on this article in The Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch about the Chevy Volt. GM is throwing tons of resources into a breakneck schedule to produce an electric powered car that is dramatically more advanced than the hybrids currently on the market. The question is whether they can have the technology developed in time for release date.

It’s sort of inspiring to see an American company try something so ambitious.

American companies try ambitious things all the time. Energy companies might try this more often, if there wasn’t the ever-present concern that their return-on-investment might get sucked away by the government as “windfall profit”. The freedom to innovate while keeping the fruits of your labor, and responding to needs by the consumer, is a feature of what we call “the market”. Familiarizing oneself with the concept would be very helpful in the current economic climate.

Josh then finds in himself a newfound concern about alternative energy sources. Despite his upbringing, he says, he was never really focused on it much.

But that’s changed over the last several months: most of the key issues that face us today, from environmental issues proper, to our geostrategic position vs. other great powers and the future of our economy, all turn on our reliance on fossil fuels. Not just ‘foreign’ ones, all of them.

And what has likely contributed heavily to this rediscovered concern? How about the gas prices that have been rising quickly over “the last several month”? But that’s nothing to be ashamed of. The price of an item is an amazing bit of information that gives suppliers knowledge of short-term future demand, gives consumers an incentive to buy more or less of a product, and, depending on the price itself, gives innovators an incentive to come up with new and better way to supply the need. This is a feature of what we call “the market”. (Detect a pattern here?)

This is instead of nationalizing the particular industry or forcing the price to an artificially lower value which could easily bring about shortages (just ask Venezuelans) and stifle innovation. I mean, a new source of a product just may cost a bit more as it’s getting ramped up, and forcing existing prices lower make consumers less likely to make the transition, unless you force them to do so. The keyword here, which must be used over and over again, is “force”. And when your government is forcing all of your economic decisions on you, this is a feature of what we call “socialism”.

Would Marshall know the free market it if jumped out and bit him? I think it just did, but according to the title of his post, he’s “shocked, shocked”. Likely that’s an intentional pun on the Chevy Volt subject, but his surprise at seeing American innovation, and his lack of understanding of his changing attitudes tells me that he apparently doesn’t recognize the source of those teeth marks.

[tags]Josh Marshall,free market,economics,supply and demand,oil industry,socialism,communism[/tags]

More deconstructing of the meme that Bush lied and the Democrats were misled. This time, it’s from James Kirchick. This isn’t someone on the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy mailing list; he’s been actively speaking out against the Right. And now we hear from him:

Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House “manipulation” — that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction — administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.

Oh please Read the Whole Thing(tm). Frankly, I’m thrilled that the Washington Post Editorial Page Editor and now an assistant editor of the New Republic are finally arriving at the truth. At the same time, the information that they’re working from — the Senate Intelligence Committee report recently released — doesn’t really break new ground in terms of the facts presented, and in fact comes to the same conclusion that the 2004 report from the same committee came to, Senator Rockefeller’s bleat about being led to war “under false pretenses” not withstanding.

As much as the media has presented and pushed and given air to the charge of lying on the part of the Bush administration, and as serious a charge as it is, one would hope that it would give as much attention to the report and those on the Left who are backing the President.

One can hope. One can always hope. But hold not thy breath.

[tags]James Kirchick,The New Republic,Iraq war,Bush lied,Senate Intelligence Comittee,media bias[/tags]

Paging Mr. Belafonte, Mr. Penn, Ms. Sheehan, et. al. Please call your office.

President Hugo Chávez has used his decree powers to carry out a major overhaul of this country’s intelligence agencies, provoking a fierce backlash here from human rights groups and legal scholars who say the measures will force citizens to inform on one another to avoid prison terms.

[…]

The new law requires people in the country to comply with requests to assist the agencies, secret police or community activist groups loyal to Mr. Chávez. Refusal can result in prison terms of two to four years for most people and four to six years for government employees.

“We are before a set of measures that are a threat to all of us,” said Blanca Rosa Mármol de León, a justice on Venezuela’s top court, in a rare public judicial dissent. “I have an obligation to say this, as a citizen and a judge. This is a step toward the creation of a society of informers.”

The sweeping intelligence changes reflect an effort by Mr. Chávez to assert greater control over public institutions in the face of political challenges following a stinging defeat in December of a package of constitutional changes that would have expanded his powers.

Looks like his powers are expanding in spite of the voters. Again, yet another predictable step towards totalitarianism from a government that the Hollywood Left finds common cause with. Ignorance of history is no excuse.

(Can we use the term “dictator” now?)

UPDATE:  Chavez has revoked the law, which is great to hear.  Thousands of protesters combined with an upcoming election probably changed his mind.  Not a good idea to get the people in an uproar so close to voting.  Is this a case of Chavez listening to the people?  I hope so.  History still suggests keeping a watchful eye, though.

[tags]Harry Belafonte,Sean Penn,Cindy Sheehan,Hugo Chavez,Venezuela,socialism,Blanca Rosa Mármol de León[/tags]

Don Surber notes that the health care system run by the state of Oregon won’t pay for cancer drugs, but they’ll cover assisted suicide.  Socialized medicine is about the money just as much as "capitalized" medicine is.

One example cited is that of a woman who’s oncologist prescribed a drug to slow the cancer growth, but Oregon Heath Care wouldn’t cover it, though she could take the Permanant Exit Door(tm) with their blessing.  Instead, the drug company gave her the medicine for free.  Surber notes the moral of the story:

Socialists to cancer victims: Kill yourself.

Capitalists: Can’t pay? No problem.

Oh and the capitalists also pay the taxes that finance the socialist programs.

The New York Post has a column up on this topic as well, noting that the health care system that Ted Kennedy would like to see could actually have killed him (well, if he wasn’t a man of means).

Problem is, governments that promise to "cover everyone" always wind up cutting corners simply to save money. People with Kennedy’s condition are dying or dead as a result.

Consider Jennifer Bell of Norwich, England. In 2006, the 22-year-old complained of headaches for months – but Britain’s National Health Service made her wait a year to see a neurologist.

Then she had to wait more than three months before should could get what the NHS decided was only a "relatively urgent" MRI scan. Three days before the MRI appointment, she died.

Consider, too, the chemo drug Kennedy is receiving: Temodar, the first oral medicine for brain tumors in 25 years.

Temodar has been widely used in this country since the FDA approved it in 2000. But a British health-care rationing agency, the National Institute for Comparative Effectiveness, ruled that, while the drug helps people live longer, it wasn’t worth the money – and denied coverage for it.

Barack Obama – and other Democrats – have been pushing a Senate bill to set up a similar US "review board" for Medicare and any future government health-care plan.

After denying this treatment completely for seven years, the NICE (did whoever named it intend the irony?) relented – partly. Even today, only a handful of Brits with brain tumors can get Temodar.

And if you want to pay for Temodar out of your own pocket, the British system forces you to pay for all of your cancer care – about $30,000 a month.

So the lion’s share of the populace is stuck with sub-standard health care, and only the super-rich can get what they need.  I thought that’s what Michael Moore said our system was like.

And the column notes that it’s no better in Canada, where, if they live close enough to the border, they come here for the care they have to wait for over there. 

Socialized health care is simply not delivering for the countries that have it.  The fact is, the US system is delivering better medical care for more of its population in a timely manner than government-run ones are.  Why would we want to change that?

I looked at the “charitability” of conservatives and liberals when Arthur Brooks came out with his study in 2006. He noted that conservatives were more charitable with their time and money than liberals.

Today we have a piece about multiple polling groups finding a correlation between the political spectrum and the honesty spectrum. But before I get to the data, I want to address the issue I have when I say “I hate polls”, which I’ve said quite a lot.

I’ve covered this a bit before, but it bears repeating. When we poll people on topics that they have little to no experience in, the poll is meaningless; no more than, as SCO contributor Mark Olson calls them, a cricket race. “Consumer confidence” numbers are as much (or more) a measure of economic news reporting as they are about how a person feels (itself, an ephemeral measurement). “Who would you vote for”, on the other hand, is certainly something each person can know about themselves for sure. Now, that may change over time, but no one else knows you better than you at this moment. It’s not a good measure of who you’ll vote for 6 months from now, but it’s accurate enough for the here and now, much more so than deciding how the economy is going based on feelings.

With that out of the way, on to the results.

Is it OK to cheat on your taxes? A total of 57 percent of those who described themselves as “very liberal” said yes in response to the World Values Survey, compared with only 20 percent of those who are “very conservative.” When Pew Research asked whether it was “morally wrong” to cheat Uncle Sam, 86 percent of conservatives agreed, compared with only 68 percent of liberals.

(Maybe that’s why liberals are all for tax increases. They figure the conservatives will do most of the paying.)

Ponder this scenario, offered by the National Cultural Values Survey: “You lose your job. Your friend’s company is looking for someone to do temporary work. They are willing to pay the person in cash to avoid taxes and allow the person to still collect unemployment. What would you do?”

Almost half, or 49 percent, of self-described progressives would go along with the scheme, but only 21 percent of conservatives said they would.

When the World Values Survey asked a similar question, the results were largely the same: Those who were very liberal were much more likely to say it was all right to get welfare benefits you didn’t deserve.

The World Values Survey found that those on the left were also much more likely to say it is OK to buy goods that you know are stolen. Studies have also found that those on the left were more likely to say it was OK to drink a can of soda in a store without paying for it and to avoid the truth while negotiating the price of a car.

And on the article goes, with more and more examples in the same vein. Buy why is this? Well, this is an opinion piece (because the MSM would never touch this with a 10-kilometer pole), so the writer, Peter Schweizer, a Hoover Institution fellow and author of a new book on this subject, actually does some analysis and gives us his take, but based on data, not just out of thin air.

Now, I’m not suggesting that all conservatives are honest and all liberals are untrustworthy. But clearly a gap exists in the data. Why? The quick answer might be that liberals are simply being more honest about their dishonesty.

However attractive this explanation might be for some, there is simply no basis for accepting this explanation. Validation studies, which attempt to figure out who misreports on academic surveys and why, has found no evidence that conservatives are less honest. Indeed, validation research indicates that Democrats tend to be less forthcoming than other groups.

The honesty gap is also not a result of “bad people” becoming liberals and “good people” becoming conservatives. In my mind, a more likely explanation is bad ideas. Modern liberalism is infused with idea that truth is relative. Surveys consistently show this. And if truth is relative, it also must follow that honesty is subjective.

Ideas, indeed. Post-modern deconstruction of traditional values did not originate from conservatives. And this is even more important, considering what year it is.

Sixties organizer Saul Alinsky, who both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton say inspired and influenced them, once said the effective political advocate “doesn’t have a fixed truth; truth to him is relative and changing, everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist.”

[tags]honest,conservatives,liberals,polls[/tags]

From a theological perspective at least. Heresy? Via the corner.

GG: Do you believe in sin?
OBAMA: Yes.
GG: What is sin?
OBAMA: Being out of alignment with my values.

I can’t imagine a way to spin that as reasonable in or out of context. Sin is being out of line with Obama’s values?

Well, in the light that for the liberal/progressive hypocrisy is the only sin … that makes sense. That is, the only error one can make is not “being true to oneself” or acting differently than one the values one believes in.

However … that isn’t what sin is.

Jim Lindgren at The Volokh Conspiracy notes a few studies showing that the carbon offset program set up by the United Nations is what amounts to a scam.

Leading academics and watchdog groups allege that the UN’s main offset fund is being routinely abused by chemical, wind, gas and hydro companies who are claiming emission reduction credits for projects that should not qualify. The result is that no genuine pollution cuts are being made, undermining assurances by the UK government and others that carbon markets are dramatically reducing greenhouse gases, the researchers say.

[…]

A working paper from two senior Stanford University academics examined more than 3,000 projects applying for or already granted up to $10bn of credits from the UN’s CDM[clean development mechanism] funds over the next four years, and concluded that the majority should not be considered for assistance. "They would be built anyway," says David Victor, law professor at the Californian university. "It looks like between one and two thirds of all the total CDM offsets do not represent actual emission cuts." . . .

Should we really be shocked that a left-wing scheme to "do something" turns into a Make Money Fa$t scam?  (Hint: No.)  It’s just become another tax, which, one wonders, if that wasn’t the plan all along.

[tags]environment,United Nations,global warming,climate change,carbon offsets,Stanford University,David Victor,clean development mechanism[/tags]

• Rep. Maxine Waters (D) tells Shell Oil execs that she, as a liberal, would be all about socializing… basically taking over their companies. (watch the video here)  Link: sevenload.com
• America Alone alert: are terrorists in Europe moving towards incompetence?
• Pallywood, hoaxes, and the mainstream media.

Erik Erickson, a contributor to Redstate.com, also has a personal blog in which he talks about local politics (he lives in Macon, GA). Yesterday, he talked about a good local government program the finds summer jobs for high school students. It does its job well, he says, but it’s having a new problem.

Erik is on the Macon City Council’s Community Resources and Development Committee, and the lady who represents the program briefed the committee on it.

During the course of the lady’s presentation she lamented the increase in the minimum wage — this from a government bureaucrat who’d already blamed Bush for cutting other social program funding.

Because of the minimum wage increase, it is now more expensive to employ each student. Because it is more expensive per student, less students can be employed. The less students that can be employed through the program, the more students there will be on the street during the summer without jobs.

And that could very probably increase the rates of petty crime during the summer.

Way to go Democrats!

He titles the post “The minimum wage and unintended consequences“, but those consequences are certainly not unforeseen, as any honest economist would have to admit to it. Democrats, when arguing for an increase, however, never seem to mention that a minimum wage increase does not, cannot, happen in a vacuum. There are consequences to tampering with the free market, but the loss of jobs is minimized or ignored by a party that claims common cause with the poor.

[tags]minimum wage,free market,Democrats,living wage,unintended consequences[/tags]

Dan Trabue has been burning the midnight oil, frequently commenting on a number of mine and Doug’s posts recently. In this, he recently denounces conservative ecological and stewardship. This is insulting and incorrect. I am as conservative as anyone. I also:

• Drive a Honda Insight getting 60-65 mpg city and 70-90 mpg highway depending on conditions.
• Our family car is a diesel VW Golf, which gets ~50 mpg.
• We use the air conditioner sparingly in summer, running an house fan nightly to cool the house and only turning on the air when the interior temperature exceeds about 85F. In winter, nighttimes the thermostat is between 55-58 (… and may be colder next winter as the kids are getting older and hardier) and 62 and 66 during daytime.
• We installed a tank-less water heater for additional conservation two years ago when we replaced our water heater.
• We compost all our waste vegetable matter and recycle.
• The house in which I dwell, is the “starter” home we initially purchased. It is 35 years old now, we will likely this summer invest in upgrading the insulation and installing and attic fan.
• We may also price geo-thermal cooling and heating.

And … to boot, I don’t buy one bit of the global warming snake oil Mr Gore and his minions are selling. But I find the contention that conservative=profligate consumer insulting and incorrect. Recall the recent comparisons of Mr Gore’s and our Presidents personal dwellings and their environmental impact. Also note, liberal Hollywood which is one of the hot beds of liberal activism and expression is also far more profligate in consumption than virtually anywhere else on the planet.

Liberals seize the high ground on conservation by talking the talk. But far too often, they don’t want to walk they but they do want, by dint of force and regulation, to get the other guy to do it for them.