Lemon’s Domestic Violence Law is organized as a conventional law-school casebook — a collection of judicial opinions, statutes, and articles selected, edited, and commented upon by the author. The first selection, written by Cheryl Ward Smith (no institutional affiliation is given), offers students a historical perspective on domestic-violence law. According to Ward:
“The history of women’s abuse began over 2,700 years ago in the year 753 BC. It was during the reign of Romulus of Rome that wife abuse was accepted and condoned under the Laws of Chastisement. … The laws permitted a man to beat his wife with a rod or switch so long as its circumference was no greater than the girth of the base of the man’s right thumb. The law became commonly know as ‘The Rule of Thumb.’ These laws established a tradition which was perpetuated in English Common Law in most of Europe.”
Where to begin? How about with the fact that Romulus of Rome never existed. He is a figure in Roman mythology — the son of Mars, nursed by a wolf. Problem 2: The phrase “rule of thumb” did not originate with any law about wife beating, nor has anyone ever been able to locate any such law. It is now widely regarded as a myth, even among feminist professors.
Mary Anastasia O’Grady in the WSJ comments on the arrest of the Honduran President at the order of that country’s Supreme Court, an event called a “coup” by many in the media and politics, including Barack Obama and the leaders of Venezuela and Cuba:
Hugo Chávez’s coalition-building efforts suffered a setback yesterday when the Honduran military sent its president packing for abusing the nation’s constitution. It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking.
But Honduras is not out of the Venezuelan woods yet. Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya’s abuses, also wants him back in power. It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.
That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.
But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.
It should be noted that President Obama, who had little to say in the early days of Iran’s turmoils (and much of that was inappropriate), found his voice immediately in this case.
Reuters: “Barack Obama said on Monday the coup that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was illegal and would set a ‘terrible precedent’ of transition by military force unless it was reversed. ‘We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras, the democratically elected president there,’ Obama told reporters.”
Obama’s initial gut reactions to the authoritarians and democrats of the world have become as predictible as they are disturbing.
The NYT has a story on Honduras that makes for an odd read:
Mr. Zelaya, 56, a rancher who often appears in cowboy boots and a western hat, has the support of labor unions and the poor. But he is a leftist aligned with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and the middle class and the wealthy business community fear he wants to introduce Mr. Chávez’s brand of socialist populism into the country, one of Latin America’s poorest. His term was to end in January.
The Honduran military offered no public explanation for its actions, but the country’s Supreme Court issued a statement saying that the military had acted to defend the law against “those who had publicly spoken out and acted against the Constitution’s provisions.”
Mr. Zelaya’s ouster capped a showdown with other branches of government over his efforts to lift presidential term limits in a referendum that was to have taken place Sunday. Critics said the vote was part of an illegal attempt by Mr. Zelaya to defy the Constitution’s limit of a single four-year term for the president.
Early this month, the Supreme Court declared the referendum unconstitutional, and Congress followed suit last week. In the last few weeks, supporters and opponents of the president have held competing demonstrations. The prosecutor’s office and the electoral tribunal issued orders for the referendum ballots to be confiscated, but on Thursday, Mr. Zelaya led a group of protesters to an air force base and seized the ballots.
When the army refused to help organize the vote, he fired the armed forces commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez. The Supreme Court ruled the firing illegal and reinstated General Vásquez.
Even the NYT kind of makes it clear which side the US should be on.
During his campaign, President Obama made a big deal of criticizing leaders who are elected democratically but don’t govern democratically. He’s had a chance to show that it mattered in Honduras. He didn’t…
That’s the sorry story as Honduras’ now ex-president, Mel Zelaya, last Thursday defied a Supreme Court ruling and tried to hold a “survey” to rewrite the constitution for his permanent re-election. It’s the same blueprint for a rigged political system that’s made former democracies like Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador into shells of free countries.
Zelaya’s operatives did their dirt all the way through. First they got signatures to launch the “citizen’s power” survey through threats — warning those who didn’t sign that they’d be denied medical care and worse. Zelaya then had the ballots flown to Tegucigalpa on Venezuelan planes. After his move was declared illegal by the Supreme Court, he tried to do it anyway.
As a result of his brazen disregard for the law, Zelaya found himself escorted from office by the military Sunday morning, and into exile. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro rushed to blame the U.S., calling it a “yanqui coup.”
President Obama on Monday called the action “not legal,” and claimed that Zelaya is still the legitimate president.
There was a coup all right, but it wasn’t committed by the U.S. or the Honduran court. It was committed by Zelaya himself. He brazenly defied the law, and Hondurans overwhelmingly supported his removal (a pro-Zelaya rally Monday drew a mere 200 acolytes).
Yet the U.S. administration stood with Chavez and Castro, calling Zelaya’s lawful removal “a coup.” Obama called the action a “terrible precedent,” and said Zelaya remains president.
Once again it seems clear enough which side the US should be taking.
John Fund has a piece called “The Law Triumphs in Honduras” in the WSJ:
foreign observers are condemning the ouster of Honduran President Mel Zelaya, a supporter of Hugo Chavez, as a “military coup.” But can it be a coup when the Honduran military acted on the orders of the nation’s Supreme Court, the step was backed by the nation’s attorney general, and the man replacing Mr. Zelaya and elected in emergency session by that nation’s Congress is a member of the former president’s own political party?
Mr. Zelaya had sacked General Romeo Vasquez, head of the country’s armed forces, after he refused to use his troops to provide logistical support for a referendum designed to let Mr. Zelaya escape the country’s one-term limit on presidents. Both the referendum and the firing of the military chief have been declared illegal by the Honduran Supreme Court. Nonetheless, Mr. Zelaya intended yesterday to use ballots printed in Venezuela to conduct the vote anyway.
All this will be familiar to members of Honduras’ legislature, who vividly recall how Mr. Chavez in Venezuela adopted similar means to hijack his country’s democracy and economy.
Seems clear enough to us which side the US should be on.
A pattern has emerged in the Obama administration in its foreign policy. Let’s take a look at a collage of events.
President Bush made a rare comment about his successor at a join appearance with President Clinton. Washington Times: “International pressure — diplomacy only works if there’s leverage,” Mr. Bush said. “It sounds wonderful — ‘Let’s go talk to people’ — but you better have leverage in order to make diplomacy work.” As for leverage, there’s this from Israel’s “stalwart friend,” the Obama administration:
Government sources said the administration has held up Israel’s request for the AH-64D Apache Longbow attack helicopter. The sources said the request was undergoing an interagency review to determine whether additional Longbow helicopters would threaten Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip. “During the recent war, Israel made considerable use of the Longbow, and there were high civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip,” a source close to the administration said.
Unfriendly actions towards friends, and silly words for enemies. Mark Steyn poked fun at Obama’s statement that North Korea’s nuclear explosions and missiles will “not find international acceptance.” Steyn: As the comedian Andy Borowitz put it, “President Obama said that the United States was prepared to respond to the threat with ‘the strongest possible adjectives.’ Later in the day, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the North Korean nuclear test ’supercilious and jejune.’”
In other news, President Obama has pledged to learn about the existence and functions of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) by the end of the year. Yes indeed, the re-branding of America seems to be just about complete. What is that “tick-tick-tick” we hear just over the horizon?
It is perhaps trite to say that the young today don’t know what it was like in the old days, and how far we’ve come. But what they don’t know can cost us money, since they tend to favor trendy and expensive environmental policy foolishness. This group apparently includes the current President. Here are some excerpts from a wonderfully entertaining piece by Jack Dini in the American Thinker — it notes, for example, that pollution levels in China’s major cities are up to 50 times higher than in LA:
No American city is among the top 50 cities in the world for air pollution according to the World Bank…seven of the world’s ten most polluted cities are in China. Of the ten cities in the world with the highest levels of air pollution, three are in India…
China has some of the worst pollution problems in the world. Nearly two-thirds of China’s 343 major cities currently fail to meet the nation’s air quality standards. Pollution levels in China’s major cities are 10 to 50 times higher than the worst smoggy day in Los Angeles. The twenty fastest growing cities in the world are all in China…
The combined carbon dioxide emissions from the 850 new coal-fired power plants that China and India are building between now and 2012 are five times the total savings of the Kyoto accords. So you can put in all those curly light bulbs and drive all the Priuses you want: India just ate that for breakfast and China will eat the next round of conservation for lunch…
India is also growing rapidly, and its major cities experience particulate levels often eight to ten times higher than the worst American cities. India is the fourth-most coal dependent country in the world and has enough reserves to last for the next 100 years. Carbon emissions in India are rising faster than nearly every other country on the planet. Between 1980 and 2006, India’s carbon output increased by 341%, compared to 321% for China, 103% for Brazil 238% for Indonesia and 272% for Pakistan…
rich people can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can’t even make any durable dent in global emissions-because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we’re foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still…
You recall then-Senator Obama’s clueless statements about China last summer: “Everybody’s watching what’s going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics. Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure…vastly the superior to us now.” (Apparently their infrastructure spending excluded pollution control equipment.) This is the genius behind the absurdity of cap and trade. Yikes!
The AP reports uncritically, indeed excitedly, on the latest fantasy of the administration:
Obama wants increased fuel efficiency, less smog — President Barack Obama outlined Tuesday the nation’s first comprehensive effort to curb vehicle emissions while cutting dependence on imported oil, calling the plan an historic turning point toward a “clean-energy economy.”…
“As a result of this agreement,” Obama said, “we will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the lifetime of the vehicles sold in the next five years. And at a time of historic crisis in our auto industry, this rule provides the clear certainty that will allow these companies to plan for a future in which they are building the cars of the 21st century.”
The fact that this massive government program will only produce 50 days of oil supply in ten years — while the US continues to remain dangerously 70% dependent on oil imports — is apparently beside the point to the Obama administration.
The financial health of Social Security and Medicare, the government’s two biggest benefit programs, have worsened because of the severe recession, and Medicare is now paying out more than it receives. Trustees of the programs said Tuesday that Social Security will start paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes in 2016, one year sooner than projected last year, and the giant trust fund will be depleted by 2037, four years sooner.
Medicare is in even worse shape. The trustees said the program for hospital expenses will pay out more in benefits than it collects this year and will be insolvent by 2017, two years earlier than the date projected in last year’s report. The trust funds — which exist in paper form in a filing cabinet in Parkersburg, W.Va. — are bonds that are backed by the government’s “full faith and credit” but not by any actual assets. That money has been spent over the years to fund other parts of government.
Therefore, it’s time to almost double the budget, increase borrowing by $10 trillion, and vastly expand the size of government, all while decreasing the quality of services like healthcare. Did we get that straight? Is there any chance of the public waking up before it is too late?
People from Michael Barone to large hedge fund managers have been pointing out the bad conduct of the Obama administration in the matter of Chrysler, up to and including the obvious falsehoods stated by the President himself. (Obama said: “I don’t stand with those who held out while everyone else is making sacrifices,” when the facts of the case are that the secured lenders volunteered to offer to treat 50% of their holdings as unsecured.) John Hinderaker contends that there’s an overarching legal philosophy at work. Most of the elite media continue to ignore this story, however, and, it is fair to note, some of the most vehement statements by participants in the negotiations are unfortunately still anonymously sourced.
We continue to wonder just what the coverage of this egregious situation would look like if most of the press corps did not agree with and idolize their man in the White House. We don’t presently recall a time when the media was so much in cahoots with an administration to such detrimental effect to the nation.
bondholders want a secure bond. If I have a first mortgage on my house here, and the first mortgage is for half of what the house is worth, and somebody says I want you to take a big haircut because I’ve got credit card debt someplace else, that’s got problems. It has problems in terms of future lending.
I mean, if priorities don’t mean anything that’s going to disrupt lending practices in the future. On the other hand, to have a few people standing in the way of something that has, ah, so much importance to the whole country, I can see why people on the other side are very upset. But giving up priorities in lending, abandoning that principle, would have a whole lot of consequences…
If we want to encourage lending in this country, we don’t want to say to somebody who lends and gets a secured position that that secured position doesn’t mean anything.
The Democrats need to listen to wise men like Buffett, otherwise there’s big trouble ahead. You don’t have to be as worked up as this fellow to appreciate the problems of a highly politicized and ideological Treasury Department, effectively under Rahm Emanuel’s control. The WSJ reported that “‘Rahm wants it’ has become an unofficial mantra among some at the Treasury.” That is not good news for America.
We wondered whether President Obama was play-acting when he announced the Chrysler Chapter 11. He sure sounded peeved (video) when he said about TCW, Oaktree and the other secured debt holders of Chrysler, “While many stakeholders made sacrifices, a group of investment firms and hedge funds decided to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout…I do not stand with them.”
Was this just a bit of political theater? Before deciding, let’s review some history. The NYT has some background:
As with so many issues in his action-packed 100 days in office, Mr. Obama confronted choices few of his predecessors encountered. His ongoing intervention in an iconic sector of the economy offers a case study in the education, management and decision-making of a fledgling president…
Mr. Obama, often after dinner with his wife and daughters, devoured briefing papers until midnight to master the intricacies of the auto industry. But he had advisers deal directly with the car companies and never spoke with the G.M. chief executive he effectively fired…
the discussions began with a heady optimism that the crisis could provide an opportunity to push the industry to produce cleaner “cars of the future,” an idea Mr. Obama had often invoked…
A former community organizer with little business experience, Mr. Obama had developed a basic knowledge of the auto industry during the campaign, touring factories, stumping with Ron Gettelfinger, a powerful ally as president of the United Auto Workers, and meeting with William Clay Ford Jr., the executive chairman of Ford who later recalled discussing “the electrification of our industry.”
The WaPo added another comment by Obama: “I know that, if the Japanese can design an affordable, well-designed hybrid, then, doggone it, the American people should be able to do the same…So my job is to ask the auto industry: Why is it you guys can’t do this?”
Our observations: (a) Obama wasn’t acting, he was really mad at the funds because they insisted on their legal rights as secured creditors and thought they could get better than Obama offered through a court process; (b) Obama has chosen to get deeply involved in the details of dealmaking with two car companies, a strange choice of Presidential priorities; and (c) Obama thinks that it’s his “job” to get American car companies to produce Japanese hybrids — even though hybrids are less than 3% of the auto market.
Hmmm. Poor and idiosyncratic business judgment, a personal arrogation of power in areas foreign to most Presidents, and pique at the insistence of others on their legal rights — this can’t end well, can it? If this President decides he is interested in an issue, watch out. If he approves your undertakings, all well and good. But if you are found wanting, perhaps by insisting on the rule of law, beware. The Eye of the One will be upon you.
Dick Morris discounts the President’s current popularity. Only time will tell if is right or merely engaging in wishful thinking:
Obama’s specific policies run afoul of the very deeply felt convictions of American voters. For example, the most recent Rasmussen Poll asked voters if they wanted an economic system of complete free enterprise or preferred more government involvement in managing the economy. By 77-19, they voted against a government role, up seven points from last month.
And in the Fox News poll — the very same survey that gave Obama a 62 percent approval rating and reported that 68 percent of voters are “satisfied” with his first hundred days — voters, by 50-38, supported a smaller government that offered fewer services over a larger government that provided more.
By 42-8, the Fox News poll (conducted on April 22-23) found that voters felt Obama had expanded government rather than contracted it (42 percent said it was the same size) and, by 46-30, reported believing that big government was more of a danger to the nation than big business. (By 50-23, they said Obama felt big business was more dangerous.) By 62-20, they said government spending, under Obama, was “out of control.”…
then will come his heavy lifting. He has yet to raise taxes, regiment healthcare or provide amnesty for illegal immigrants. He hasn’t closed down the car companies he now runs and he has not yet forced a 50 percent hike in utility bills with his cap-and-trade legislation. These are all the goodies he has in store for us all.
We know for sure that there will be a day of reckoning. The numbers simply don’t add up for Obama to have a program that does not soak the vast middle class along with the rich. It is what happens between today and that unknown day in the future that is the troubling element.
Will the President be able to create an enduring political majority with a ward-of-the-state mentality, or will events intervene to prevent that, or will some senior Democrats act to prevent the excesses that now seem likely? With the media in his pocket, and a bulletproof majority in Congress, things do not look too promising at present.
You may not have heard that a cod holocaust is underway, though it was widely reported four weeks ago on day one of this month. Don’t say you haven’t been warned:
PETA Endorses Seal Hunt, Cites Need To Stop Atlantic Cod ‘Holocaust’ — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) staged a rally this morning in Quebec’s Iles de la Madeleine to unveil a new campaign to protect Atlantic cod from one of their chief predators, the Canadian harp seal. Eight people attended the demonstration. “We have to fight back against these dangerous seals on behalf of those who cannot be heard,” announced Daphna Nachminovitch, PETA’s vice president for cruelty investigations. “Because they are underwater. Sea kittens, rise up against this Holocaust!”
Meanwhile, MSNBC notes that Obama is the first US President in recent memory not to have thrown out a first pitch at a baseball game during his first hundred days. Why would that be?
“I face this challenge with profound humility…I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this…was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal…”
As Bill Buckley said: “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” Too late for that now.
As a liberal columnist friend of ours observed, Obama is in many ways the “generic Democrat” you see in opinion polls. Certainly his views seem to be typical of the left of the Democratic Party. What distinguishes Obama is his audacity — his remarkable and openly expressed grandiose sense of destiny. Any man who produces an autobiography at the age of 33 should never be underestimated.
We previously noted the ridiculous EPA ruling that CO2, a gas that is necessary for human life, is now to be considered dangerous. Here’s what the Obama administration is really up to. Ed Markey: “Industries across the country will just have to gauge for themselves how lucky they feel if they kill legislation in terms of how the EPA process will include them.”WSJ:
carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant that threatens the public and therefore must be regulated under the 1970 Clean Air Act. This so-called “endangerment finding” sets the clock ticking on a vast array of taxes and regulation that EPA will have the power to impose across the economy, and all with little or no political debate.
This is a momentous decision that has the potential to affect the daily life of every American, yet most of the media barely noticed, and those that did largely applauded. When America’s Founders revolted against “taxation without representation,” this is precisely the kind of kingly diktat they had in mind.
Michigan Democrat John Dingell helped to write the Clean Air Act, as well as its 1990 revision, and he says neither was meant to apply to carbon. But in 2007 five members of the Supreme Court followed the environmental polls and ordered the EPA to determine if CO2 qualified as a “pollutant.” The Bush Administration prudently slow-walked the decision. As Peter Glaser, an environmental lawyer at Troutman Sanders, told Congress in 2008, “The country will experience years, if not decades, of regulatory agony, as EPA will be required to undertake numerous, controversial, time-consuming, expensive and difficult regulatory proceedings, all of which ultimately will be litigated.”
The Obama EPA has now opened this Pandora’s box. The centerpiece of the Clean Air Act is something called the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, or NAAQS, under which the EPA decides the appropriate atmospheric concentration of a given air pollutant. Under this law the states must adopt measures to meet a NAAQS goal, and the costs cannot be considered. For global warming, this is going to be a hugely expensive futility parade.
Greenhouse gases mix in the atmosphere, and it doesn’t matter where they come from. A ton of emissions from Ohio has the same effect on global CO2 as a ton emitted in China; and even if Ohio figured out a way to reduce its emissions to zero, it would still have no control over the carbon content in its ambient air. But under the law, EPA would be required to severely punish Ohio — and every state — for not complying with NAAQS…
Hundreds of thousands of currently unregulated sources will suddenly be subject to the EPA’s preconstruction permitting and review, including schools, hospitals, malls, restaurants, farms and colleges. According to EPA, the average permit today takes 866 hours for a source to prepare, and 301 hours for EPA to process…For now, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson claims her agency will only target cars and trucks.
If industries object to all this, they could become particular targets of punitive regulation. It is noteworthy that Congressman Ed Markey was so open about how government coercion would work: “Industries across the country will just have to gauge for themselves how lucky they feel if they kill legislation in terms of how the EPA process will include them.” Swell country.
Saving the banking system was pretty simple if you understood the situation and could think clearly. An article in Portfolio makes the case that the inept Tim Geithner (and other members of the Obama economic team) are bureaucrats who don’t understand the real world of banking all that well. Just what you’d expect from an administration of philosopher kings opposing corporate villains. Normally we’d say that the worst is past for the economy at this point, but these guys could still find ways to screw things up.
The Keystone Kops spectacle of the auto company negotiations, with the government now on every side of the talks seems to be another example of ideology making a simple matter complicated. The real world solution has been clear for months — Chapter 11, possibly a pre-pack.
This unnecessary complicating of the inherently simple is exactly what you’d expect from a college professor president — ideology and a kind of clueless arrogance trumping real world experience and common sense. Now, after the Napolitano fiasco, and the incoherent as well as unpopular CIA memo policy, we have the added insult that the administration is going to release photos of some interrogations. Heaven help us!
It is no surprise that many in the media continue to love Obama, unhealthy as that is for democracy. It has been almost two generations now since reporters and editors had any real world experience. Is it any wonder that the utopians love their favorite prof?
Question: what happens if reality intrudes in a really nasty way over the next few years? What does the US do, for example, if Iran gets its bomb, threatens its Sunni neighbors and others, attempts a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and the US is still 70% dependent on imported oil and has a tiny strategic petroleum reserve? Quick, what’s the next move?
The Obama administration is nothing if not fashionably in tune with the campus orthodoxy of the moment. Here are some thoughts from the US Energy Secretary, of all people:
“I think the Caribbean countries face rising oceans and they face increase in the severity of hurricanes. This is something that is very, very scary to all of us. The island states in the world represent — I remember this number — one-half of 1 percent of the carbon emissions in the world. And they will — some of them will disappear…
(sea levels) could go up as much as three-quarters of a meter in this century, but there is a reasonable probability it could be much higher than that…Lots of area in Florida will go under. New Orleans at three-meter height is in great peril. If you look at, you know, the Bay Area, where I came from, all three airports would be under water. So this is — this is serious stuff. The impacts could be enormous”
Britain still might be a little ahead of us in the inanity department, however. Their fashionable scientists say things like this: “We need to be doing a lot more to reverse the global trend toward fatness, and recognize it as a key factor in the battle to reduce (carbon) emissions and slow climate change”…
The WSJ says that carbon dioxide has been declared dangerous by the US government. Carbon dioxide is present in a minuscule amount (380 parts per million) in the atmosphere and is absolutely essential to human life:
The Obama administration declared Friday that carbon dioxide and five other industrial emissions threaten the planet…The Environmental Protection Agency finding that the emissions endanger “the health and welfare of current and future generations” is “the first formal recognition by the U.S. government of the threats posed by climate change”…The finding could touch every corner of Americans’ lives, from the types of cars they drive to the homes they build. Along with carbon dioxide, the EPA named methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride as deleterious to the environment.
You may not recall that carbon dioxide is essential to human life, because it is essential to plant life. In the process of photosynthesis, six molecules of water plus six molecules of carbon dioxide produce one molecule of sugar plus six molecules of oxygen. Thus plants grow, and so man can live. But the US government considers it dangerous. So it goes.
As for methane, one of the other now-dangerous gases, we have commented on occasion here and there about livestock flatulence. One might draw a comparison with what’s now coming out of the EPA now, but that would be unbecoming.
For example, in the footnote at the bottom of page 2, the authors seem not to be able to bring themselves to use the term “illegal immigration” when referring to the things “rightwing extremists” object to: “It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.” Very politically correct, don’t you know. However, the document does manage to work in the phrase “cabal of Jewish financiers,” and never lets you forget that its topic is “rightwing extremists.” It uses that term almost 50 times in a mere nine pages.
John Hinderaker dissects this lamentable piece of work. He says, “It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this Homeland Security report is politically motivated, and reflects the authors’ political prejudices more than an objective evaluation of a significant terrorist threat.” Indeed.
