UPDATE: Welcome readers from Small Dead Animals! Thanks for the link, Kate! Canadian readers, this post that I wrote is an index to most of my recent posts on your free speech troubles with the Human Rights Commissions. I hope and pray that you guys can get your civil liberties restored, and be the True North Strong and Free, again!
UPDATE: If you are looking for the story on the hate crime bill that adds pedophiles to the list of “protected” groups, see here.
Under a recently-introduced bill, H.R. 1966, bloggers would face up to two years in prison if they “harass” public figures by criticizing them in a “severe, repeated, and hostile” manner, and thereby cause them “substantial emotional distress.”
I guess fascism is coming along faster than I thought.
U.C.L.A. Law Professor Eugene Volokh, the author of a First Amendment treatise, has concluded that the bill is unconstitutional. I agree, as I explain here. As a federal appeals court noted in DeJohn v. Temple University (2008), “there is no harassment exception to the First Amendment’s free speech clause.” Speech that causes emotional distress can be protected,as the Supreme Court made clear in barring a lawsuit by Jerry Falwell over an offensive parody.
Wow, it’s like the left is doing everything they accused Bush of doing, which he never did. The fascist policies they imagined were all projections onto Bush of what they intended to do themselves! Now I get it. It wasn’t conservatives who were in favor of government control of private lives, it was the progressive left.
The bill is a telling example of how the American Left has turned against free speech and civil liberties. The bill’s sponsor, Linda Sanchez (D-CA), and nearly all of her 14 co-sponsors are liberals. All of them backed the federal hate-crimes bill passed by the House yesterday, which is designed to allow people who have been found innocent in state court to be reprosecuted in federal court. (That bill has been criticized by four members of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, including law professor Gail Heriot, and by civil libertarian Wendy Kaminer. Advocates of the federal hate-crimes bill once cited the defendants in the Duke Lacrosse case, who were innocent, as an example of people who should be prosecuted in federal court).
Cap and Trade Top Ten List
1. Cap and Trade Is a Massive Energy Tax
2. It Will Not Make A Substantive Impact on the Environment
3. It WillKill Jobs
4. It Will Cause Electricity Bills and Gas Prices to Sharply Increase
5. It Will Outsource Manufacturing Jobs and Hurt Free Trade
6. It Will Make You Choose Between Energy, Groceries, Clothing or Haircuts.
7. It Will Be Highly Susceptible to Fraud and Corruption
8. It Will Hurt Senior Citizens, the Poor, and the Unemployed the Worst
9. It Will Cost American Families Over $3,000 a Year
10. President Obama Admitted “Electricity Rates Would Necessarily Skyrocket” under a cap-and-trade program. (January 2008)
I can help with number 4: the energy price increases for consumers are right here, courtesy of Michele Bachmann.
Their post goes on to list and analyze the effects of various legislation proposed by Democrats in terms of number of jobs lost and amount of money confiscated from the private sector for the government to spend. It’s amazing how many times Democrats tried to destroy the economy while Bush was President. And now they will finally be able to do it!
The article also mentions how many jobs will be lost by the proposed green jobs programs, as well as how many jobs will be outsourced to China and India, who will enjoy a manufacturing boom since they are not capping their emissions at all.
That’s right, let’s be clear on that:
The Ultimate Outsourcing: India and China have repeatedly said they would not match U.S. environmental goals in order to protect their economies. Cap and Trade will merely move manufacturing jobs to China and India.
There are people I know who voted for Obama who are worried about their jobs. They complain to me about outsourcing. They do not understanding that Obama causes outsourcing by taxing “the rich” and regulating “greedy corporations”. What a tragedy! Defeated by your own ignorance!
The 10 part series on cap and trade
The Heritage Foundation has also started a nice series of 10 posts about what cap and trade will do to the economy. In this series, they are going into a lot more detail than in the summary posted I talked about above.
It works like this: Policymakers set a cap on the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that can be omitted into the atmosphere. Each power plant, factory, refinery, and other regulated entity will be allocated allowances (rights to emit) six greenhouse gases. However, only a certain percentage of the allowances will be allocated to these entities. The remaining percentage will be auctioned off or distributed to other emitting entities. Most emitters will need to purchase at least some allowances at auction. Emitters who reduce their emissions below their annual allotment can sell their excess allowances to those who do not–the trade part of cap-and-trade. Over time, the cap would be ratcheted down, requiring greater cuts in emissions.
So this is basically a tax on energy production. Yes, Democrats think that we produce too much energy, employing too many Americans, and that we sell it for too little money. According to Democrats, we need less production, fewer jobs and higher consumer prices for electricity. And other companies who use energy will have to pay more for it as well.
Take a look at this graph showing projected job losses under the Liberman-Warner cap and trade bill:
Again, Heritage explains how cap and trade transfers money out of the private sector, where money is used to produce goods, into the public sector, where money is wasted by bureacrats on bicycle paths and gold monuments to Obama.
…if President Obama were to sign a cap and trade bill into law, he would have to call for familial budget cuts much greater than one dollar. (For a brief explanation of how cap and trade works, go here.) As recently acknowledged by a top White House official, a global warming tax could generate as much as $1.9 trillion in tax revenue over eight years, which amounts to a nearly $2,000 tax every year for every American household.* Add this up over the period of a few years and we’re talking about trillions of dollars in lost income for the entire U.S. economy.
And here’s the chart:
How much will cap and trade cost you?
I hope the people with low income who were hoping to become rich under Obama won’t be too shocked to find that the poor do better under capitalism not socialism. I mean, I hope they don’t drop their television remote controls and doughnuts.
UPDATE: Good news! Michelle Malkin says the cap and trade tax is in trouble! It turns out that the Democrats in manufacturing-intensive states are aware of what the tax will mean to their unemployment rate.
The NRCC sent out a helpful fact sheet outlining why the radical green plan is really in trouble. You can thank opposition from Democrats in manufacturing and energy-producing states.
Michelle has all the citations from the Democrat politicians who are never going to vote for this mess. So, good news!
WINTERY KNIGHT 