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Senate “Gang” (Including Thune) Sells out to Donks on Drilling
Intro to Article: Some GOP senators allied with Democrats are peddling a “drilling” bill that actually adds exploration restrictions, raises taxes and may even end up meaning no new domestic oil. Some Republicans never learn.
Does this ever nail it! It’s even worse than Charlie Brown trying to kick the football!
Whenever the nation is faced with a big problem that the people demand be solved, we can always be sure of one thing: A group of Republican senators will scramble away from their party’s principles to join Democrats in some grand “compromise” scheme.
This kind of stuff just drives me nuts! What’s wrong with showing some cojones for a change instead of falling for the false belief that a “Republican” compromise gesture gets us ANYTHING, except farther away from where we really need to be going.
Unfortunately SD’s lone GOP Senator John Thune has bought into (or been bought into) this display of political pusillanimity.
The bipartisan “Gang of 10,” led by Republican Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Democrat Kent Conrad of North Dakota has grown into a “Gang of 16,” with GOP Sens. John Warner of Virginia, Norm Coleman of Minnesota and John Sununu of New Hampshire the newest misguided Republicans. A more apt nickname would be “The Gang That Couldn’t Think Straight.”
The “comprehensive” bill that these four, plus fellow Republicans Bob Corker of Tennessee, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Johnny Isakson of Georgia and John Thune of South Dakota are joining with Democrats to push would exclude — permanently — the entire Pacific Coast from drilling. It would also limit a lot of the Atlantic Coast, and ban drilling anywhere within 50 miles of shore.(Emphasis added.)
Hey, Senator…if EVERY ACRE in the country was planted to ethanolic corn crops, it STILL wouldn’t be enough to maintain our fuel supplies…we need to drill wherever there’s oil – and the recent experience of the Gulf production platforms in the face of repeated hurricanes, shows that this can be done with extremely minimal environmental risk.
It’s almost enough to make a life-long (the Chief started his involvement with Youth for Goldwater before he could even vote) Republican activist give up on the once Grand Old Party…but for what alternative? Maybe it’s time to revive the Whigs or something, since The Libertarians, and other minor parties are fatally flawed at present by their hopelessly blind situational awareness concerning the national security problems we have with Islamofascism, and the resurgent Soviet Union Russia and Putin’s Cold War II.
This is just too strange not to note.
One Nation, Under a New Obama Salute
These people are entering realms of consciousness that are more typical of north-central Europe in the 1930’s than anything that has come since. How very weird this is…not just the whole idea itself, but the overpowering need that Obamanationers have to absolutely DEVOTE themselves to what is apparently becoming a Fuhrer-figure to them.
Also, enough already of the neo-Boshevik style poster art – a Freudian slip is showing somewhere, for sure.
But you say there’s not really anything totalitarian going on here? Come again? What about The Candidate Of Change promising that he will CHANGE the details of our lives…no matter what WE want to do:
…he is going to give us not just new politics, but new lifestyles. He recently told an audience, “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.”
Read on at RadioActive Chief
Ramesh Ponnaru posting on NRO’s THE CORNER site has given a Slate article a blast for, as he heads it:
SNEERING at SOUTH DAKOTA
I’ve long admired William Saletan’s work, and so I was taken aback by his post on South Dakota’s new informed-consent law on abortion, which has a much higher snark-to-substance ratio than I have come to expect from him. The law requires abortionists to tell women seeking their services that abortion “will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.” According to Saletan, the South Dakota legislators are “lying to women about their bodies.”
The post goes on to logically dismantle Saletan’s attempt at argument.
Read more at RadioActive Chief.
Yeah, but NOT the way you might think it is! The Chief just HATES to throw mudballs at popular ideas, but this one is just too irresistable. First, Momentous Pronouncements from the Argus’ esteemed (satire alert!) paragon of political and ideological objectivity:
Kranz: Pickens plan has promise for S.D
If they haven’t heard much about him, South Dakotans will certainly know soon enough about T. Boone Pickens. His message on the future of energy is resonating loudly enough, and that has created some interest.
Hey, isn’t it AMAZING what a multi-million dollar multimedia ad campaign can accomplish in this day and age?
A Sioux Falls man, Lee Brown, a consultant, already was working on some unrelated projects with people connected with Pickens. “They in turn recommended me to help in this effort since I am once again located in South Dakota,” Brown said. He now is state director for activities promoting the Pickens Plan in the state – a plan to change how energy is used in this nation.
From what the Chief has seen, Pickens’ plan has more to do with how energy is PRODUCED, not how it’s USED… but I quibble.
Brown says South Dakota is already ahead of the game. He knows the importance of alternative energy, particularly wind energy, as well as the benefits from its use. Brown is a political consultant by trade, but he now has taken on an additional project.
Hello? As if this ISN’T political?
“Wind has been on the radar screen for three years, and projects are being funded, looking at anything in renewable fuels,” she said. “The Pickens Plan is a positive step, putting a national focus on the idea that we need to quit sending money to people who really don’t like us. His plan has huge potential….Downside? “There is no downside,” she said.”
No downside? And what’s the bit about where the money is going to go? Uh…follow the money. IMHO the following piece has some real deal-busters. Read on at RadioActive Chief.
Cold War II Taking Off with Rus Bombers, Carriers, arms to Venezuela?
This sure makes the decision to keep the B-1 base at Ellsworth AFB open look better and better.
Russia is betting on Blackjack and upping the odds: It may be a bluff, or Kremlin policymakers may believe they already are holding an inside straight.
Russian policymakers Thursday boosted their threat to deploy supersonic Tupolev Tu-160 “White Swan” — NATO designation Blackjack — nuclear bombers in Cuba to say they might put them in Venezuela and Algeria, too.
Like the original threat, floated three days earlier on July 21, to deploy the Blackjacks in Cuba, this one was reported Thursday in the newspaper Izvestia and was also attributed to unidentified sources in the Russian Defense Ministry.
Q. How close would the proposed single B-1 base be to the enemy – in EITHER Cuba or Venezuela at 2000 km/h?
A. A LOT closer than either is to South Dakota’s Ellsworth AFB!
How much is bluff, and how much is reality? Hard to say…but very much the sort of strategic “great game” played by the Soviets through Cold War I.
For more go to RadioActive Chief.
This continues to be an issue, and continues to attract comments, because the Governor (and some others) don’t want to let it die a well-deserved death. This is the Chief’s read on it.
Witness skeptical about preschool
Gov. Mike Rounds continues to push for preschool standards in South Dakota, but a Stanford educator says studies so far don’t support a “full-scale” program.
Erik Hanushek, a Stanford professor who is among expert witnesses for the state in a school-aid lawsuit, seems lukewarm about the value of preschool, which he admits is “complicated.” “There are some good but very small-scale studies showing positive effects of preschool,” Hanushek said in an e-mail exchange. “Most of the positive effects, however, are not educational improvements but reductions in crime and incarceration. These might well be good investments for society, but they do not solve the education problem.”
Rounds, in an address to school superintendents in Pierre on Tuesday, said, “Preschool is something that is very, very important.”
EuroSocialists, Lenin, Hitler, and Plato would all be in agreement with the Governor on this one. How so?
Mrs. Chief recently received some correspondence from Norwegian cousins who related that their first child was starting the (government mandated) kindergarten – at one-year of age!! (How sad is that, for the state wanting to get its hooks in that early?)
Plato’s Republic advocated that the training of children was too important to leave to the parents, and that to obtain good citizens of the polis, systematic removal from parents for training was the ideal to be implemented.
The above noted 20th-century devotees of the superior wisdom and knowledge of their respective states (of totalitarianism) also advocated, and implemented programs to reduce the influence of parents in the early childhood education of children, again, in the interest of getting more reliable citizens of their versions of a “new world order”.
While Governor Rounds obviously is NOT in the category of these stark practitioners of the superiority of the state in all that matters, his trend on this issue is clearly in the same direction: that the early education of children is too important to leave to parents…this proposition being a (possibly unintended) keystone in the development of more TOTALitarian (get it? TOTAL – as in state control of all aspects of life, including for example, child-rearing) relationships between the state and the people.
This path is NOT a good direction to start down.