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EPA Carbon Dioxide Decision Threatens Liberty and the Economy
Tweet Share on Facebook December 8, 2009 Comment (21)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
As President Obama was busily traveling by greenhouse gas-emitting jumbo jet to Copenhagen for an international conference on the weather, Lisa Jackson, his administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was busy telling the world that the United States government now officially believes carbon dioxide is a threat to public health and welfare.
Jackson's issuance of an endangerment finding, according to Capital Alpha Partners' James Lucier, provides federal regulators "with the basis they need to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act." And, following up on Nobel laureate Al Gore's thesis in his book Earth in the Balance, Jackson also seconded the idea that the internal combustion engine is the greatest threat to mankind's continued existence: "The Administrator finds that the combined emissions of these well-mixed greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles and now motor vehicle engines contribute to the greenhouse gas pollution which threatens public health and welfare."
The potential costs to personal liberty, not to mention the U.S. economy, that could flow from Jackson's finding are enormous. They are also potentially without check, as Jackson is now free to propose through administrative rule-making what Congress is thus far unwilling to pass as legislation.
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Understanding the Debate Over Abortion in the Health Reform Plan
Tweet Share on Facebook December 8, 2009 Comment (8)By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Abortion has emerged as a major hurdle in the push for healthcare reform legislation, with a vote expected today on a critical amendment that threatens to torpedo the whole thing. The amendment comes from a pair of pro-life Democrats, Sens. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, and aims to bar federal funds from helping to pay for abortions. This is essentially the same language that got tacked on to the healthcare bill in the House, known there as the Stupak amendment, for its sponsor, Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak. They insist that they are just trying to make sure that existing federal law is applied to healthcare reform. But pro-choice critics say that the Nelson/Stupak approach is more restrictive than the current law and would place new restrictions on abortion rights. They advocate for an approach that, they say, would keep the current ban while not impinging more broadly on a woman's right to get what is a perfectly legal medical procedure.
In an effort to sort it all out we asked Stupak and Rep. Lois Capps, the California Democrat who lead the pro-choice side in the House (and whose views are currently incorporated in the senate bill), to write commentaries making their respective cases. You can read Stupak's here and you can read Capps's here. They're both worth a look because the health reform effort could turn on this issue: Nelson has said he will oppose the bill if his amendment doesn't pass (and it's not expected to); and Stupak Democrats made the margin of victory in the House.
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Mothers Discuss Sarah Palin's 'Going Rogue' on NPR
Tweet Share on Facebook December 8, 2009 Comment (18)By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I had fun yesterday taping a segment of NPR's Tell Me More with Michel Martin. Michel invited me to join two moms who are regulars on the show—Maryland state delegate and Democrat Jolene Ivey, a mother of five; and Mommy Wars author and political independent Leslie Morgan-Steiner, a mother of three—to discuss Sarah Palin's Going Rogue. I was invited because my review of Palin's book is in the current issue U.S. News's digital edition (and will go up the website tomorrow). I'm delivering on my pre-Thanksgiving promise to our readers to read her book and give a moderate Republican mom's reaction to it.
We talked about the book for about an hour, some taped and some not, and about 17 minutes of it will make it on the air. (Of course, on the way home I thought of 10 more things I should have said!) But it doesn't seem like many women are talking or writing about the book, only men, so it was good that NPR brought us all together. I think you'll enjoy the interview, because some of the opinions were surprising and the conversation was very civil—no cable-TV shoutfests here! Here's the link to the program's page if you'd like to listen in. And here's a link to Michel's blog about our Going Rogue discussion. If you've read Sarah Palin's book and have some thoughts on it—whether you're a mom or not—I'd love to hear from you.
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Abortion in Healthcare Bill Remains a Puzzle for Democrats—and GOP Opponents
Tweet Share on Facebook December 7, 2009 Comment (11)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Poor Harry Reid. For weeks, his main priority has been to get healthcare legislation through the Senate. And he's pushed hard, using just about every legislative trick available to him. Now, just when it started to look like he was making some progress comes the news that the folks back home have turned against it. In one recent statewide poll, 52 percent of Nevada voters said they didn't want the healthcare reform package Reid has been pushing so hard—and almost half of those said they were "strongly opposed," meaning they are likely to take their anger over the legislation out on their state's senior senator next November when he is once again up for re-election.
Nevada, for all of its Democrats, is not a liberal state. Reid joined the Senate leadership by proclaiming, or at least pretending, that he was a moderate who could help the leadership strike a balance with rank-and-file Democrats from places where liberalism was not the regular order of things. Now, with the House and Senate and the White House in definably liberal hands for the first time in more than a generation, Reid is caught between the national party and the folks back home, only 40 percent of whom say they are at all interested in helping him win re-election.
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The Pearl Harbor Attack and the First Draft of FDR's 'Infamy' Speech
Tweet Share on Facebook December 7, 2009 Comment (4)By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Today is the 68th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the event which brought the United States into World War II. President Franklin Roosevelt's speech to congress and the nation the next day is one of the best remembered presidential addresses. But while most remember it especially for his pronouncement that December 7, 1941 would be a day that would "live in infamy," few realize that FDR's first draft of the speech had a slightly different line.
As I recount in White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters, FDR started drafting his remarks late in the afternoon of December 7. He summoned Grace Tully, one of his secretaries, to his office, and she found him alone behind his desk, two or three piles of notes neatly stacked in front of him. He was lighting a cigarette.
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Obama Must Assert Himself Over Congress in Tuesday Jobs Speech
Tweet Share on Facebook December 7, 2009 Comment (2)By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The top three issues for the American people are jobs, jobs and jobs. And so President Obama is giving a major economic speech tomorrow at the Brookings Institution here in Washington. According to the AP, Americans' concerns over the jobless rate—still above 10 percent nationally—are bringing down his approval ratings, threatening Democrats in the midterm elections, and rightfully causing lawmakers to hesitate when it comes to enacting the rest of his agenda. It's hard to vote in favor of, say, a new "war surtax" to pay for the Afghanistan war (as House Appropriations Chair David Obey has suggested) when so many folks may not be paying their taxes in the first place because they're unemployed.
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Sarah Palin Jokes With the Media at the Gridiron Club
Tweet Share on Facebook December 7, 2009 Comment (4)By John A. Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The nation's No. 1 best-selling nonfiction author spent Saturday night in Washington, D.C., at the Gridiron Club's winter dinner. Sarah Palin thanked the assembled journalists for the invitation.
"Who would have guessed I'd be palling around with this group?" she asked, and surely there are Sarah fans wondering why she was there going vogue, instead of rogue. Well, a gal's gotta make her millions, and the media helps sell books. Besides, being anti-everything can wear a person down. "The view is so much better from inside the bus than under it," she noted.
The only mousse was for dessert (rim shot, maestro please), but Palin did some field-dressing of her egotistical audience. It was fun to be among the capital's "leading journalists and intellectuals," she said. "Or as I like to call it, a death panel."
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Global Warming E-Mails Scandal Doesn't Disprove Climate Change Facts
Tweet Share on Facebook December 7, 2009 Comment (23)By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I must take issue with last week's posting by my conservative colleague Peter Roff on the E-mail scandal that's rocking the scientific community.
In that scandal, according to the New York Times, one of whose reporters broke the story and was the first to release the E-mails:
John Tierney, a Times science columnist, explained in Science Times last week the most controversial revelation so far in the e-mail—Jones's effort to "hide the decline" (in temperatures) when preparing a graph for the cover of a report to be read by policy makers. The graph, showing sharply higher temperatures in the last several decades, relied in part on tree ring data, until the rings began to diverge from thermometer readings and show a decline in temperatures. Jones and his colleagues did not believe that data and removed it from the graph, substituting direct thermometer readings without explicitly acknowledging the switch.
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Wine, Champagne and Truth in Labeling
Tweet Share on Facebook December 7, 2009 Comment (5)By Doug Heye, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Late last week, the Tax and Trade Bureau created the Calistoga American Viticultural Area, meaning that any wine using the Calistoga name must contain a minimum of 75 percent grapes from the new sub-appellation within the famed Napa Valley.
The decision, codifying that the product is what it says it is, had been sought for years by both producers and consumers. Had it not been for the difficulty in determining the fate of two misleading labels in particular (Calistoga Cellars and Calistoga Estates, wineries neither based in Calistoga nor using the required minimum percentage of local grapes required by the new AVA, will have three years to phase out the use of the word "Calistoga") this surely would have happened years ago.
It's a step forward, but too often consumers remain left in the dark. During an unseasonably warm weekend last month, I stopped at a local grocery store to purchase a bottle of sherry for an outdoor dinner party. The grocery store had plenty of wines labeled "sherry," but none from the Jerez de la Frontera region of Spain, where true sherry is made. Upon closer inspection, there were several different kinds of "port," but not a one from Portugal. If I wanted the authentic product, I had to go elsewhere.
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Boxer Undeterred By Global Warming E-Mails Scandal
Tweet Share on Facebook December 4, 2009 Comment (29)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
California Sen. Barbara Boxer has taken an odd position in regards to the latest developments in climate science. The publication of hundreds of e-mails between some of the world's leading climate researchers is proving to be an embarrassment to the proponents of man-made global warming.
In the emails, scientists appear to be encouraging each other to keep their stories straight about global warming while discussing strategies to discredit opposing views and deal with data points that inconveniently fail to support the correct conclusion: that human activity have caused a permanent increase in the world's temperatures.
You might think that the embarrassment accompanying the disclosure of these emails—even the liberal Jon Stewart is making fun of them on The Daily Show—would generate at least a pause in the adopt legislation that will cause billions of dollars to be sucked out of the American economy and kill thousands of jobs here at home. And you'd be wrong.
Boxer, who chairs the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works and is a leading legislative proponent of anti-climate change legislation, has not even missed a step toward her eventual goal. Rather than deal with the allegation she intends, to paraphrase the old joke, to go after "the alligator."
