Tuesday, September 15, 2009

There's No Other Explanation ...

For as long as I have considered such things, I have believed as Thomas Jefferson said, “That government governs best that governs least.”

When I was 14 years old, I sent two weeks allowance to Ronald Reagan’s unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign to wrest the Republican nomination from President Gerald Ford. In high school, during Mrs. Sellers’s weekly current events discussion, (at the height of the farmers' protest movement for 100% price supports) I argued that farmers had no more right to government subsidies than any other business person.

During my college years, I debated with political science professors that we should eliminate about 75% of the federal government. In speech class, I spoke in favor of right-to-work laws (in opposition to unionization) and against the government-sponsored pyramid scheme known as Social Security. Also while in college, one of my greatest Eureka moments came when I read economist Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, perhaps the best defense of limited government and the free market ever written.

As a newspaper columnist in the mid 1980s I was a consistent libertarian-conservative, espousing a limited government approach to every issue: in favor of legalizing marijuana, pro-gun rights, against mandatory seat-belts, defending private property rights, against minimum wage laws, supporting tax-cuts … and always an ardent supporter of the First Amendment.

My views haven’t changed much. An 8x10 framed color photo of Ronald Reagan hangs on the wall over my desk. I still subscribe to Reason magazine (since about 1984) which carries the slogan, “Free minds and free markets.” I’m a registered Republican and have been for more 25 years. During that time I’ve voted for Libertarian candidates a few times, but only ONE Democrat. (Gladys Chapman, the supervisor of elections in Bay County, FL always spoke slowly in concise, grammatically correct sentences, and as a reporter I appreciated that.)

Before the 2008 presidential election, I took a quiz to see which candidate I should support. Out of all those men and Hillary (about 20 hopefuls there were, I think) Barack Obama was dead last. He and I saw eye to eye 8% of the time. Today, I heard that Obama called Kanye West a “jackass.” As far as I can tell, this is the first position he’s taken since becoming president that I agree with.

Yet apparently none of all that matters … not my political philosophy, my party affiliation, my understanding of economics or the lessons I’ve drawn from history.

No. You see, apparently the real reason I oppose Barack Obama’s agenda for America is because I’m a racist. For all the folks to the far left of sanity, no other reason will do.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Why I'm a Global Warming Skeptic

There are several reasons I don’t believe in man-made global warming. What follows are the biggest of these (though there are others not mentioned).

First, the warmest year in the U.S. during the past 120 or so years was in 1934. I’ve heard 1998 supposedly came close … but no banana. That means global warming has had 75 years to break the record (with the aid of tons of CO2 emissions) and still can’t do it. Does warming not really mean warming?

Apparently not. Since the aforementioned 1998, world temperatures have leveled off and in fact, since Al Gore’s 2006 Inconvenient Truth propaganda film, have declined about three-quarters of a degree Fahrenheit. That may not sound like much, but it’s more than half the entire temperature rise since modern climate record-keeping began around 1880. Oh, you didn’t know that — that all the horrible global warming which is supposedly killing polar bears and threatening to sink Florida beneath the waves, amounts to one single degree Celsius from 1880 to 1998? Hype is an amazing thing when done well. And this why the preferred term has become “climate change.” (When I was a kid, “climate change” was what we referred to as “weather” or “seasons.”)

I’m also put off by the cultic behavior of the strongest adherents of man-made or anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory. Try this, whenever you here the term “global warming” or “climate change” from an AGW alarmist, mentally substitute the word, “sin.” I thought about substituting “Earth” with “God” but Gaia is a wimpy little deity who’s constantly threatened by her creation. Essentially her only line of defense is to die and take the human race with her. Nevertheless, the AGW faithful gives the Taliban a run for the money in the intolerance department.

And a final big reason I’m skeptical of AGW is that I don’t trust the people pushing the theory. I think governmental funding and fear of being politically incorrect has utterly corrupted much of the science that purportedly proves AGW. (The United Nations? Really? People are actually taking the U.N seriously … about ANYTHING!?!) I believe the big companies that are “going green” are looking for ways to make a fast-buck, and liberal politicians are using this “crisis” as an excuse to bring huge portions of the economy, as well as how individuals live their lives, under government control. I don’t like people who use fear to stampede folks into making a rash decision.

Today politics is all about fear. George W. had the terrorists of course, (who actually DID kill about 3,000 people in New York). Two wars and the Patriot Act later though, I have to admit there may have been excess in the response. But today we have Barack Obama who sees “weapons of mass destruction” every where he looks — in the banking industry, with car manufacturing, in healthcare and threatening the environment.

I adored Ronald Reagan as president. He never played on people’s fears. Talk about “yes, we can” … now that was Reagan! Return the nation to economic prosperity? Yes we can! Defeat the evil empire of communist oppression? Yes we can! Be proud of ourselves again as a people? Yes we can! He did it all, and he did it by pushing an agenda of individual freedom and personal responsibility at home, and strength and determination abroad. By contrast, when Obama says, “Yes we can” he means we can turn our back on the economic system that has made America the wonder of the world; we can strip away the liberties that our Founding Fathers tried to protect with the Constitution; and we can forego Reagan’s shining city on the hill for an intermittently wind-powered hovel in government-run housing. Yes, we CAN be miserable!

Obama and his like-minded, left-wing cohorts in Congress will have “misery for all” as the new closing line for the pledge of allegiance. And I’m absolutely convinced AGW alarmism is a major front for making Obama's dream a reality.

Coming soon: But if I Did Believe In Man-Made Global Warming, Here’s What I Would Do