Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Environment, Junk Science, National Security | Tags: America's Breadbasket, California's Central Valley, Endangered Species Act
California’s great Central Valley has been called the breadbasket of America. Certainly it has been a great agricultural region, and the Congress of the United States has turned it into a dust bowl. Unemployment is huge, but statistics do not include those who have stopped looking.
Those sticks in the photo are a young orchard deprived of water by the use of the Endangered Species Act to protect the Delta Smelt — a very small inedible fish.
The Endangered Species Act is one of those laws cooked up in Washington D.C. that was well intentioned, but questionable in its effects. It quickly became a weapon in the hands of radical environmentalists. A claim that an “endangered” species was present was enough to shut down huge proposed projects — at least through years-long court battles — often permanently.
It is easy to claim that a species is endangered, and hard to confirm. In the history of the earth, it has not been unusual for a species to go extinct. The famous ones are the passenger pigeon — over-harvested to extinction for food, and the Dodo.
The modern list of endangered species is not a great record of success, but full of species that turned out to be not endangered after all, species that recovered promptly when a predator was removed. Is extinction a natural act —survival of the fittest — or something that must be prohibited at all cost? We don’t know.
Remember that the polar bear was just listed as “threatened” in spite of the fact that there are more bears at present than ever before. There’s a lot of politics attached to the list, for modern environmentalism is largely political.
Environmentalists don’t like the modern world, they don’t like rivers to be dammed, they don’t like suburbs, they don’t like development, and the more radical want a return to the Pleistocene. They prefer that people live in very dense cities, have few children and except for corridors between dense cities, return the rest of the land to wilderness.Those are the complications.
The Sacramento-San Joaquin Water Reliability Act is now before Congress. Obama has announced that if it reaches his desk, he will veto it. Why am I not surprised.
Nunes’ Sacramento-San Joaquin Water Reliability Act goes to a vote in the House Wednesday and if it passes, it will guarantee that water the farmers paid for finally gets to the parched Central Valley. It will put an end to the sorry stream of shriveled vineyards, blackened almond groves and unemployed farm workers standing in alms lines for bagged carrots from China.
The White House announced that Obama would veto Nunes’ bill because it would “unravel decades of work” on California water regulations.
The Administration strongly opposes H.R. 1837, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act because the bill would unravel decades of work to forge consensus, solutions, and settlements that equitably address some of California’s most complex water challenges. …
The Administration strongly supports efforts to provide a more reliable water supply for California and to protect, restore, and enhance the overall quality of the Bay-Delta environment. The Administration has taken great strides toward achieving these co-equal goals through a coordinated Federal Action Plan, which has strengthened collaboration between Federal agencies and the State of California while achieving solid results. Unfortunately, H.R. 1837 would undermine these efforts and the progress that has been made.
Lots of weasel words.
Filed under: Education, Freedom, Law, Statism | Tags: big government, Co-Parenting?, The Encroaching State
Jessie Sansone’s four-year-old daughter drew a picture of a man with a gun in her Kitchener, Ontario kindergarten class, with a crayon — and then all hell broke loose.
Waterloo Police met Sansone at the school when he tried to pick up his children. He was told he was charged with possession of a firearm, he was handcuffed and put in one of the several squad cars waiting outside. At the station, he was strip-searched, told to disrobe and bend over, then put in a cell.
Police went to his house, told his pregnant wife that he had been charged with possession of firearms, and that she would have to come with them, and her 15 month old daughter would have to go with a social worker. Mrs. Sansone called her mother who rushed over to take the child. The children had been taken without their parents’ knowledge to Family and Children’s Services and were being interviewed by social workers.
Sansone said that police searched his house and found a plastic gun that shoots foam darts. Sansone said his daughter was drawing him getting the bad guys and monsters.
These things happen with increasing frequency. Lack of common sense, political correctness, overreaction, Nanny state.
Local police say they will review how they handled the case, but won’t apologize. The head of Children’s Aid said she would do everything the same way tomorrow. The superintendent of Waterloo Region District School Board, Gregg Bereznick, said:
“We do work hand in hand with the families because we co-parent.”
There’s the problem, in a nutshell. Co-Parent? When did parents allocate co-parenting to the state? The Alberta government has just released an updated Education Act which tells homeschooling families that they cannot teach certain things in their homes. Under this new bill, nothing in the education of a child can go against the Alberta Human Rights Act.
If you recall, this was the “Human Rights” group that prosecuted Ezra Levant for 900 days under that act for daring to publish the Mohammed cartoons in his former magazine, The Western Standard. And this was the group that unsuccessfully prosecuted Mark Steyn for quoting what another author said about Islam in an article.
O.K. This is Canada. But we have had the same sort of thing here. Children belong to the state? Didn’t we just have an example of government deciding what your children may eat and determine that the lunch mother packed at home is not suitable?
Government will decide what kids are to be taught and how much is to be education and how much is to be indoctrination? Are your children to be taught to fear global warming or that there is controversy about climate change? Have you gone to YouTube to view “the Story of Stuff?” Are your kids learning history from Howard Zinn’s deplorable People’s History of the United States? Have you read your kid’s school books?
Filed under: Health Care, Law, The Constitution | Tags: Freedom of Religion, President Obama, Sandra Fluke
Congressional Democrats in the guise of Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi have been trying to pull a fast one. Sandra Fluke, portrayed as a 23 year-old coed at Georgetown Law School is actually 30 years old, and a long time activist for unmarried victims of domestic violence. Somehow this morphed into being an activist for “reproductive justice,” which means getting someone else to pay for your birth-control pills.
You have probably heard about her testimony. She claimed it cost poor law students $3,000 for three years of birth control; Rush Limbaugh noted that she was declaring on national television that she wanted to have an active sex life without benefit of marriage, and wanted someone else to pay for it, and suggested that implied that she was a slut. That prompted President Obama to make a personal telephone call to her to tell her how proud her parents must be that she was standing up for her principles.
Birth-control seems a private matter, and I don’t understand why someone else should pay for the cost. It is not a health matter, but a matter of Democrat feminists’ demand for “choice.” You choose whether or not you want to have sex outside of marriage, you choose whether or not you want to have a baby, and you choose whether or not you want to pay to do something about it. The price of a 30-day supply of birth control pills at WalMart has been variously described as $4, $6 and $9. That does not seem exorbitant — even for a student.
Adding birth control to mandated health insurance raises the cost of that insurance. Catholic institutions are morally opposed, and the matter is clearly unconstitutional under the freedom of religion clause of the First Amendment. The State shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion.
This is a major case of hypocrisy. Nancy Pelosi and Kathleen Sebelius are both Catholic. President Obama, at the same time he celebrates adding to the cost of ObamaCare unnecessarily, is asking Congress to triple the cost of Tri-Care, the military’s health insurance, to the troops, in order to cut the budget.
All this is an attempt to garner women’s votes by telling them that Republicans want to deny women the right to birth control. They are already running ads to that effect. This president has made it clear that he has little respect the separation of powers nor for the Constitution that he took an oath to preserve, protect and defend. He intends to get around it with executive orders and regulation.