Save Us, Governor Goodhair!

Mitch Daniels isn't running, so George F. Will is working his gooper fanboy magic on another governor:





Will types up the usual Perry b.s., and ignores what he's actually done in Texas (Current two year budget shortfall: $27 billion). This caught my eye:

Supposed examples of Perry’s extremism evaporate in sunlight. One is that he intimated support for Texas’s secession from the Union. After people shouted “Secede!” at a rally, he said that he understood their frustration but added: “We’ve got a great union. There is absolutely no reason to dissolve it.” He signed a law requiring women seeking abortions to be shown sonograms of their babies. Do people objecting to this mandatory provision of information object to the new graphic warnings on cigarette packs?

An appalling example of the apples-oranges argument typical of alleged 'small government' hypocrites like George Will.

Cigarettes are an addictive product sold for profit that has been known to cause cancer for decades.

An abortion is a personal decision. All the medical advice necessary is provided by a doctor with years of training.

Got that, Will? You're nothing but an authoritarian propagandist, shilling for those with power and money.
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We Should Recite Our Lies In Bow Ties

BDG BDR mentioned that Dana Milbank has a new man-crush (Chris Christie, all the cool people are certain he's the next big thing).

Thia led me to the War Criminal Post, where George Effing Will is pimping another G.O.P. governor:

At first, the banquet audience at the 38th annual Conservative Political Action Conference paid Mitch Daniels, Indiana's Republican governor, the conventional compliment of frequently, almost reflexively, interrupting his address with applause.

Yo, peeps, this is how, a real wordsmith crafts, an opening sentence.

But as they realized they were hearing something unconventional - that they were being paid the rare compliment of being addressed as reflective adults - they reciprocated his respect with quiet attention to his elegant presentation of conservatism for grown-ups.

Get real, Will. This is CPAC. That audience fell into alcohol/HFCS induced comas while waiting for the next Andy Breitbart/birther wingnut to get on stage and bite the head off another chicken.

America, he said, faces "a survival-level threat," a new "Red Menace" consisting of ink. No enterprise, public or private, "can remain self-governing, let alone successful, so deeply in hock to others as we are about to be." Some people accept or "even welcome" a "ballooning of the state" that consigns America to "a gray parity" with other profligate nations. Such people believe history is controlled by a "leftward ratchet," always - never mind "the Reagan Interruption" - moving toward a more powerful state.

1-2-3! 1-2-3! Genuflect to Reagan, complain about our national debt, and with Reagan-style convenient memory, forget that Ronald Wilson Reagan quadrupled that debt.

Americans must say "an affectionate thank-you" to the last century's major social welfare programs - then sunset them, after those Americans "currently or soon to be enrolled" in them have passed from the scene. Social Security and Medicare should be updated to conform to Americans' "increasing longevity and good health." Medicare 2.0 should respect Americans' dignity and competence by empowering them to make "their own decisions" by delivering its dollars directly to individuals and expecting them to "pay for more of their routine care like the discerning, autonomous customers we know them to be."

The standard "Let's pay for our wars for plutocrats, tax cuts for plutocrats, and disastrous deregulation for plutocrats by stealing from Social Security."

To spur economic growth, we must "untie Gulliver": "The regulatory rainforest through which our enterprises must hack their way is blighting the future of millions of Americans." Barack Obama's recent executive order to prune the forest was, Daniels said, akin to the world's leading rap music producer suddenly expressing alarm about obscenity. And Daniels thinks conservatives' "first thought" should be about "those still on that first rung of life's ladder":

"Upward mobility from the bottom is the crux of the American promise, and the stagnation of the middle class is in fact becoming a problem, on any fair reading of the facts. Our main task is not to see that people of great wealth add to it but that those without much money have a greater chance to earn some."

Funny, G. W. Bush and our deregulation-created financial bubble seem to have gone down the memory hole. Along with 30 years of GOP class warfare on behalf of the wealthiest 2% of Americans.

Author of the most succinct characterization of the Obama agenda ("shock-and-awe statism"), Daniels has practiced the lean government he preaches. Under him, Indiana has its fewest state employees since 1978, the nation's lowest state-government employment per capita, the lowest effective property taxes and the third-lowest per capita spending. So he has the credentials to counsel conservatives about the need to compromise in the interest of broadening the constituency for difficult reforms.
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He reminded his listeners that when he was serving Ronald Reagan, the president admonished him and others that "we have no enemies, only opponents." The case for less strident conservative rhetoric is practical: "As we ask Americans to join us on such a boldly different course, it would help if they liked us, just a bit."

Do not, Jefferson warned, undertake great departures on "slender majorities." Conservatives criticized Democrats for doing just that regarding health care.

Here is our closing crescendo of convenient amnesia. Both Will and Daniels remember that Daniels served in the Reagan Administration. Neither can remember that Daniels was G. W. Bush's OMB director from January 2001 through June 2003. I wonder why?

George Will has lied about global warming in the pages of the Washington Post. I say eliminating any mention of Mitch Daniels' record as OMB Director is equally dishonest.


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The WSJ, "Climate-Industrial Complex", and the Big Lie

Here's the WSJ editorial:

Mr. Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank, and author of "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming" (Knopf, 2007).

This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a "climate-industrial complex" is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain.

Bjorn Lomborg? Who is that guy?:

Australian National University academic, John Quiggin, writing in the Australian Financial Review in March 2002, pointed out the number of refereed publications Lomborg has produced on statistical or other scientific analysis of environmental issues "is zero".
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The concern over Lomborg's misrepresentation of the science was so great that three complaints were lodged with the Danish Committee for Scientific Dishonesty, which Lomborg describes as "a national review body, with considerable authority". [8]
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The committee found "the publication is deemed clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice". [9] They stated "there has been such perversion of the scientific message in the form of systematically biased representation that the objective criteria for upholding scientific dishonesty ... have been met".
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Back to the WSJ editorial:
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Spain has been proclaimed a global example in providing financial aid to renewable energy companies to create green jobs. But research shows that each new job cost Spain 571,138 euros, with subsidies of more than one million euros required to create each new job in the uncompetitive wind industry. Moreover, the programs resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs for every job created.
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This sounds familiar! Cue George Will:

The Spanish professor is puzzled. Why, Gabriel Calzada wonders, is the U.S. president recommending that America emulate the Spanish model for creating "green jobs" in "alternative energy" even though Spain's unemployment rate is 18.1 percent -- more than double the European Union average -- partly because of spending on such jobs?

It is true that Calzada has come to conclusions that he, as a libertarian, finds ideologically congenial. And his study was supported by a like-minded U.S. think tank (the Institute for Energy Research, for which this columnist has given a paid speech).
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The WaPo must be cracking down on poor George, making him print a disclosure.

In any case, here's Gabriel Calzada, per the NRDC.

ExxonSecrets.com reports that the "Center for New Europe" - where Gabriel Calzada is a visiting fellow - has received $170,000 form ExxonMobil since 1998. Calzada also is tied into the Heartland Institute, another well-known hub of climate science denial.

Yet these energy industry funded hacks have the nerve² to warn about the "Climate-Industrial Complex".

² This clown, Bjorn Lomborg, even had the gall to allude to President Eisenhower's famous quote:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

If the Wall Street Journal were ever to take this as a warning rather than as a goal, I'll eat my hat.



P.S. Many of our Senators have sold their souls to the Oil, Gas, and Coal Industries. Wind farming? Not so much. (Thanks Cliff, for the link.)
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