Right Minded Online

The things that happen to you when you’re #1.

President Bush talked Tiger basketball Monday night.

Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., called The Commercial Appeal just before midnight Monday night to report that he had persuaded President Bush to sign a white Memphis Tigers basketball cap.

On PBS, the exchange of words as the President left the House chamber after delivering his State of the Union address was partially obscured, but it was clear that Cohen told the President that the Tigers are the No. 1 team in the country at the moment and that they are playing Houston Wednesday night.

Cohen said the President said, “Yeah, you all have a great team” and that Houston wouldn’t beat them.

As soon as he left the chamber, Cohen checked his voicemail and heard a message from Coach John Calipari.

Cohen played Calipari’s 9:15 p.m. Central time reply from his voicemail Tuesday morning.

Calipari’s message: “Congressman! John Calipari. I saw it all. Showed him the hat. ‘Our team’s No. 1. Get that right. Who we play next: Houston. They could beat us. They shoot threes.’ He turns back and says ‘they’re not going to beat ya.’ Lovely. Lovely. You’re the best. Nobody represents us better than you. Cal.”

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Those who read this blog (both of you) know that I am a sucker for a good Holocaust survival story, and the Catholic news agency had a great write-up a few days ago, “The Righteous Heroes of the Holocaust.”

A Washington, D.C. mother recently killed her four children several months after pulling them out of public school. They were supposed to have been homeschooled, but there is no evidence this ever took place. Nevertheless, educrats are using the incident to lobby for more government control of homeschooling.

The New York Times editorialized that the relative lack of homeschool regulations afforded the mother the power to keep her children from the “prying eyes of teachers, social workers and other professionals who otherwise might have detected signs of abuse and neglect of the girls.”

Mitchell L. Stevens, an associate professor at New York University, was quoted by the New York Times that school officials are “society’s best watchdogs of how parents treat children.”

Oh, really?

According to a National Center for Education Statistics report that used data from the 2005-06 School Survey on Crime and Safety, we learn that students aged 12–18 were victims of about 1.5 million non-fatal crimes at school, including thefts and violent crimes.

Six percent of students reported they had carried a weapon on school property during the previous 30 days.

Ten percent of male students in grades 9–12 reported being threatened or injured with a weapon on school property in the past year, compared to 6% of female students.

There were 14 homicides and 3 suicides of school-age youth (ages 5–18) at school.

Twenty-four percent of students aged 12–18 reported that there were gangs at their schools.

There are also numerous instances of high-school and middle-school teachers — both male and female — who sexually prey on the students they are supposed to be teaching (talk about “prying eyes”).

And these statistics don’t even account for the ideological battle being waged in many public school districts across America.

For example, Americans United for Separation of Church and State sent a demand letter to the Tuscaloosa City Schools in Alabama, asking that all teachers be told not to show the film “Facing the Giants.” The letter came after one complaint about the movie, which is an inspirational film about a football team at a private Christian school. It deals a lot with the power of prayer, which, of course, is highly offensive to the left, and so it can’t be shown.

While God is out in many public school districts, homosexual advocacy is all the rage. In Maryland, a group of parents is asking a judge to stop explicit sex-education curriculum that was implemented by the Montgomery County Board of Education which teaches that homosexuality is innate and provides depictions of “erotic” sex techniques. Just the kind of thing every parent wants his child to learn at school.

While you can’t use the name of God reverently in school, you can trash the Almighty. In San Juan Capistrano, California, a high school student and his parents have filed a lawsuit against a history teacher, contending that the instructor told students during class that “when you put on your Jesus glasses, you can’t see the truth,” compared Christians to “Muslim fundamentalists,” and suggested churchgoers are more likely to commit rape and murder.

In St. Lucie, Florida, the school board last month voted 4-1 to teach a graphic condom-education curriculum to fourth-graders. The curriculum includes teaching children how HIV is contracted.

There are plenty more examples, but you get the idea. That which is good and wholesome is often dismissed as “unconstitutional,” while that which is immoral often gets a pass, even an endorsement from the public education establishment. (Thankfully, public schools here in Wilson County so far appear to be immune from this inversion of morality.)

Indeed, the concept that father knows best is completely lost on liberals, who are most likely to oppose homeschooling, or at least advocate its strict oversight. Liberals view the public school domain as a means for indoctrinating youth into their perverted beliefs, which is why public schools have become the largest repository for homosexual advocacy in this country.

Children who attend private schools (especially Christian schools), but more specifically those who are homeschooled are a threat to liberals because children who are taught at home are children who are not under the thumb of liberal teachers unions and left-wing educrats. In addition, liberals have an inherent distrust of average citizens to make the best choices for their children (with the sole exception of abortion). To conservatives, government is best that governs least, but to liberals, government is best that governs cradle to grave, and homeschooling puts a chink in the left’s nanny state.

Facing the Giants is one of the best sports movies I’ve ever seen, not only because it tells an inspirational story, but because that story involves God. A high school in Tuscaloosa, Alabama thought so, too, and chose to show the film last month. You can probably guess what happened next:

Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) has sent a demand letter to Tuscaloosa City Schools in Alabama, asking that all teachers be told not to show the film Facing the Giants. The letter came after one complaint about the movie.

Liberty Counsel has offered its assistance to the school district, its officials and employees.

Two classes at Paul W. Bryant High School watched Facing the Giants during class before Christmas break. The movie is an inspirational film about a high school football team that overcomes many obstacles to become a winner. It tells the story of faith in the face of long odds and the need to align our priorities with God’s.

AU claims that showing the movie in a public school classroom violates the First Amendment. In response to the complaint, the school suspended further viewing of the movie to investigate the matter.

“In the worldview of Americans United, there is no room for religion,” said Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel. “The problem with that view is that it is contrary to our heritage, history and the First Amendment. The First Amendment does not require that public schools become religion-free zones.”

Actually, I disagree with Staver on one point. There is room for religion at AU. There is room for evolution, which is the creation story for those who do not believe in God. There is also room for Democrats to use the pulpit to campaign for office. There is simply no room for Christianity when it is espoused by evangelicals.

There’s talk in Washington, D.C. about an economic stimulus package that would include a healthy round of tax rebates and cuts that Democrats are actually warm to. Of course, the Democrats would also load it up with increased entitlement spending, but the fact that they’re wrapping their arms around a potential tax cut, after demonizing the Bush tax cuts for seven years, it noteworthy.

“I really feel good that we have an opportunity to do something together,” Reid said, standing in the White House driveway with Pelosi after talking with Bush. Reid said the size of a deal suggested by Bush was “a good number.”

Administration officials are focusing on rebates of $800 to $1,600 for individuals and couples and so-called bonus depreciation to allow companies to deduct 50 percent of business investments made this year. Democrats say the package also should include boosts in unemployment benefits, food stamp payments and the Medicaid health care program for the poor and disabled. Talks between Pelosi and Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, have focused on smaller tax rebates of perhaps $500 for individuals.

If the Democrats were still the minority party in Congress, they wouldn’t be doing this. They would instead be ratcheting up their recession hopes and blaming President Bush for “the worst economy since Hoover.” But they are the majority party now, it is an election year, and the Democrats know they cannot escape blame if the economy does head south. For all their bashing of conservatives and conservatism, it is telling that when the chips are down, Democrats are prepared to turn to conservatism — in this case, tax cuts — to help stimulate the economy. They, too, know that conservatism works every time it’s tried.

Related post: The global market meltdown and the stimulus farce

It snowed in Baghdad earlier this month for the first time in 100 years. It didn’t snow much, but just imagine living in a big city where everyone experiences snow for the first time. Dawood Shakir, director of the Iraqi meteorology department, said that climate change might be to blame for the rare event, which also prompted Amir Delju, senior scientific coordinator of the World Meteorological Organization’s climate program, to quip “Global warming has not stopped.”

Of course not.

At the end of 2007, the Associated Press ran a story cataloguing the oddball weather events that occurred last year, record heat, too much rainfall, too little rainfall, twisters, and all sorts of meteorological catastrophes, prompting the AP to surmise, “2007 seemed to be the year that climate change shook the thermometers, and those who warned that it was beginning to happen were suddenly honored.”

During the past few years, we’ve seen a subtle change take place in the global warming hoax. The term “global warming” has started to morph into the more inclusive “climate change” so that global warming alarmists can incorporate all forms of extreme weather into their solemn warnings of planetary destruction.

It’s easy to proclaim global warming when it’s hot, but sometimes the weather doesn’t cooperate, as in Florida right after New Year’s when a cold spell threatened the citrus industry, or each of the past two Atlantic hurricane seasons that proved a flop for those who said global warming would give us bigger, stronger, and more frequent hurricanes. So, somewhere along the way, global warming alarmists began to employ the ingenious idea of the more nebulous phrase “climate change” so that any weather extreme, be it cold or hot, wet or dry, can be blamed on human activity.

There is not a shred of scientific evidence that proves a link between human activity and climate change, yet global warming alarmists have taken to their cause with religious-like zeal. After all, one has to have faith to believe this stuff, because factual analysis destroys it.

Global warming, or climate change, has become all the rage among the world’s leftists because it provides the vehicle to bigger government and higher taxes. I say that, because every single solution proposed to fight this faux crisis involves bigger government and/or higher taxes. Even if the panic were over global cooling instead of global warming, the proposed solutions would be the same: more government control. Liberals live for government control.

To cite two examples that have taken place just within the past month-and-a-half, the U.S. Congress passed as part of its energy bill a total ban on the incandescent light bulb by the year 2014. In six years, the Thomas Edison light bulb will be verboten in the U.S. It will be replaced by compact fluorescent bulbs (CFL’s), which cost about $3 apiece, but last much longer, and use 75% less energy.

Sounds great, huh? Well, there is the nagging fact that small amounts of highly toxic mercury in CFL’s pose problems for consumers when breakage occurs and for disposal when bulbs eventually burn out. So Congress has mandated that we trade a light bulb that poses absolutely no environmental risk for one that does — all in the name of global warming.

In California, meanwhile, a proposed revision to the state’s building codes would require that a programmable communicating thermostat (PCT) be installed in every new home. In addition, every change to an existing home’s central heating and air system would require that home to be fitted with a PCT beginning next year. Each PCT would include a non-removable FM receiver that would allow power authorities to increase or decrease a person’s thermostat to any value they choose. Under normal circumstances, such changes would be limited to plus or minus four degrees, and a homeowner would be able to override any changes. But during emergency events (i.e., global warming), the thermostat could be whatever the power authority desires, and no one would be able to alter their own thermostats.

This is where global warming, or climate change, is headed. Liberals exist to usurp the rights and limit the economic activity of others, and global warming provides them that vehicle. (Hypocritically, those who are at the forefront of this movement, such as Al Gore, demand sacrifices from us while refusing to limit their own lifestyles by even a smidgen.) By morphing global warming into the catchall “climate change,” global warming alarmists are creating a political climate in which any extreme weather event or odd weather pattern can be construed as man-made, and therefore demand that governments take action regardless of what the weather is doing. Banning the incandescent light bulb and taking over your thermostat are just two examples of what the left will do if global warming is written into public policy.

Focus on the Family has been touting a Roe IQ test on this, the 35^th anniversary of that terrible Supreme Court ruling which stripped away states’ rights and ended up making abortion universally legal. The results of the Roe IQ test, in FoF’s words, “Americans have a lot to learn.”

According to Tennessee Right to Life, 93% of abortions are performed as a means of birth control, 1% are the result of rape or incest, 3% for fetal abnormality, and 3% to save the life/health of the mother. So when abortion-rights advocates claim that abortion MUST remain legal for cases of rape, incest, or the life/health of the mother, remember that 96% of abortions are performed for OTHER reasons than these.

For the first time in a quarter-century, the Memphis Tigers are the #1 team in men’s college basketball. I was 13 years old the last time this happened.

Read the Commercial Appeal write-up here.

Previous post: Eye of the Tiger.

That’s Olivia St. John’s advice to bureaucrats who want to stick their nose in homeschool families. The article begins by recounting the murder of four children who were pulled out of Washington, D.C. public schools by their mother and were later murdered. Bureaucrats are using the quadruple murder as an excuse to more closely monitor the activities of homeschool families. However, St. John quickly dispatches the suggestion that children might be safer in public schools.

A National Center for Education Statistics, or NCES, report using data from the 2005-06 School Survey on Crime and Safety arrived at several disturbing conclusions:

Students ages 12–18 were victims of about 1.5 million non-fatal crimes at school, including thefts and violent crimes.

Six percent of students reported they had carried a weapon on school property during the previous 30 days.

Ten percent of male students in grades 9–12 reported being threatened or injured with a weapon on school property in the past year, compared to 6 percent of female students.

There were 14 homicides and 3 suicides of school-age youth (ages 5–18) at school.

Twenty-four percent of students ages 12–18 reported that there were gangs at their schools.

And, sadly, there are countless news stories about teachers sexually preying on students, including some teachers who actually murder students or encourage them to murder others. For instance, last May, a high school teacher experienced in wrestling attempted to strangle student, Ashley Reeves, by using his forearm to break her neck. He left her in the woods to die before searchers thankfully found her alive 30 hours later.

The concept that father knows best is completely lost on liberals, who are most likely to oppose homeschooling, or at least advocate its strict oversight. Liberals view the public school domain as a means for indoctrinating America’s youth into their hedonistic beliefs, which is why public schools have become the largest repository for homosexual advocacy in this country. Children who attend private schools (especially Christian schools), but more specifically those who are homeschooled are a threat to liberals because children who are taught at home are children who are not under the thumb of liberal teachers unions and left-wing educrats. In addition, liberals have an inherent distrust of average citizens to make the best choices (with the sole exception of abortion) that govern our lives. To conservatives, government is best that governs least, but to liberals, government is best that governs cradle to grave, and homeschooling puts a big chink in the left’s armor.

District lessons teach ‘erotic’ sex techniques

A parents group is asking a judge to halt an explicit sex-education curriculum implemented by a Maryland school board that teaches homosexuality is innate and provides depictions of “erotic” sex techniques.

Brandon M. Bolling, of the Thomas More Law Center, told Judge William J. Rowan III that state law requires that information presented in public schools be supported with evidence, and the teaching that homosexuality is “innate” lacks that support.

If I were a betting man, I’d wager that references to Christianity are strictly verboten in that school district.

So much for all the hoopla about a melting Greenland. The Copenhagen Post reports that “a brutal cold snap is raging across the semi-autonomous nation of Greenland.”

On Disko Bay in western Greenland, where a number of prominent world leaders have visited in recent years to get a first-hand impression of climate change, temperatures have dropped so drastically that the water has frozen over for the first time in a decade.

‘The ice is up to 50cm thick,’ said Henrik Matthiesen, an employee at Denmark’s Meteorological Institute who has also sailed the Greenlandic coastline for the Royal Arctic Line. ‘We’ve had loads of northerly winds since Christmas which has made the area miserably cold.’

Matthiesen suggested the cold weather marked a return to the frigid temperatures common a decade ago.

“We Greenlanders have acclimated to changing conditions over the past 1100 years,” said [Ilulissat Mayor Anthon] Frederiksen. “Temperatures change at regular intervals.”

What? Temperatures change at regular intervals? This is heresy! Wait until I tell the global warming people about this!

However, “The mayor cautioned against thinking that the freezing temperature indicated that global warming claims were overblown.”

Of course, who in their right mind would ever lead something like this to question the infallibility of global warming?

Iraq casualties in December are down 80% from a year ago.

In December 2006, according to an analysis based on casualty reports released by the Defense Department, 82 U.S. military personnel were killed in Iraq as a result of enemy action. In December 2007, 14 U.S. military personnel were killed in Iraq as a result of enemy action.

Indeed, you can tell how good things are going in Iraq by the amount of non-reporting by the mainstream press.

Actor Ben Stein tells us:

Intelligent design theory, or ID, is opening new doors of scientific research, particularly in cancer and other disease research, according to its adherents, but a new movie, “Expelled” starring Ben Stein explores how an “elitist scientific establishment” is apparently muzzling and smearing scientists who publicly discuss ID.

The First Amendment is under brutal attack in the scientific community, Ben Stein, a former presidential speechwriter-turned-actor and commentator, says in the film, which opens in theaters on Feb. 12.

“I always assumed scientists were free to ask any question, pursue any line of inquiry without fear or reprisal,” he says. “But recently, I’ve been alarmed to discover that this is not the case.”

In an exclusive interview with Cybercast News Service – with audio clips below – Stein contends that rigid Darwinists are silencing their critics in academia, which the film explores, and discusses how ID ideas are helping in cancer research and similar work.

Yet the ID research that could potentially produce medical breakthroughs, says Stein, is also being undermined by Darwinian scientists who don’t want ID research viewed as legitimate.

This, of course, is strikingly similar to stem-cell research. Adult stem-cell (ASC) research is getting all the results in the medical field, but liberals keep pushing embryonic stem-cell (ESC) research. Private money for ESC research is drying up because of its lack of results, and so the left is pushing hard for taxpayer funding of ESC research. Why? It’s all about abortion. Darwinism is the religion of the left. It’s the creation story for the godless. And abortion is the sacrament. The number one objective of the Democrat Party is to keep abortion legal at all cost. The most effective way to do that is to continue to deny the humanity of the unborn. And ESC research, which involves carving up human embryos, enables that denial of humanity.

Michelle Malkin cites a statistical analysis by Syracuse University Arthur Brooks that shows the right is more tolerant than the left.

When I was on the book tour for Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild, critics predictably countered by playing the moral equivalence card. Show them how intolerant, racist, sexist, hateful, conspiratorial-minded, and violent the Left can be, and they sputter “B-b-b-b-b-ut the Right is just as bad.”

Spend anytime in the blogosphere and it’s clear that the two sides of the political galaxy are not created equal. One side burns effigies of American soldiers and craps on the American flag. The other does not. One side wraps itself in assassination chic. The other does not. One side indulges in vicious Sambo photoshops, rank religious bigotry, death wishes, gloating over the illnesses of public figures, and fill-in-the-blank derangement syndrome. The other does not.

Finally, Professor Brooks surmises “To put this into perspective, note that even Saddam Hussein (when he was still among the living) got an average score of eight from Americans. The data tell us that, for six in ten on the hard left in America today, literally nobody in the entire world can be worse than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.”

Yep. That’s the American left.

Conventional wisdom over on the left has it that Republicans are a bunch of racists and bigots. Yet it is the Democrats who are obsessed with race in the middle of their presidential campaign. “But Mark,” you say, “the Republicans don’t have a black candidate right now and the Democrats do.” This is true, but even when Alan Keyes was running for the GOP nomination, race was not an issue with us. But it is with the Democrats.

Among the most recent news on race relations and the Democrat Party comes from Obama’s spiritual mentor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity United.

On Sunday morning – amid intensified crossfire between Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Obama over the use of race in the Democratic presidential campaign – Wright was preaching from the Gospel of John, using his powerful style to link the story of the loaves and fishes to a contemporary political message.

Man should not put limits on what God can do, but that’s what people always do, he told the crowd. Just as God made five loaves and two fishes feed thousands, God has provided liberators for blacks in the past – from Nat Turner to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and now Barack Obama. But, Wright said, there were always reasons not to follow them.

Some argue that blacks should vote for Clinton “because her husband was good to us,” he continued.

“That’s not true,” he thundered. “He did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky.”

Many in the crowd were on their feet, applauding – amazed, amused and moved by the fiery rhetoric of their preacher, who is about to retire.

This is amazing, because all you hear about Bill Clinton and race relations was that he was the first black president. But now we have a prominent black preacher who says it just ain’t so.

In other news, we learn that Obama’s candidacy has split the black caucus.

The Clinton supporters — among them, civil rights pioneer Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) — have said their endorsements didn’t hinge on race. Instead, they cited long-standing relationships with the Clintons, a respect for Hillary Clinton’s experience in national politics and, for some, geographical alliances with her in New York.

But now that Obama has won the Iowa caucuses and appears poised to do well in other early-primary states, some African-American lawmakers are pointing to the Clinton backers and calling them political opportunists who did not believe in the electability of a black candidate.

Folks, if Democrats were really all about affirmative action, every one of their candidates would step aside and give the nomination to Obama. But they don’t. And if Jesse Jackson had any courage, he would be pounding the microphones demanding affirmative action for Obama the same way he does whenever he sticks his nose in the private sector. But we don’t hear much from Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton about Obama. I’ll guarantee you, if a Republican were attacking Obama the way Hillary Clinton has been, the reverends would be all over the media complaining about it and calling the GOP racist.

Barack Obama is the “post-partisan” politician. While pretty much every Democrat running for president is making vague, feel-good promises about “change” of some sort, Senator Obama wants to remake Washington, D.C. into a unified city.

Good luck.

Calls for change come around every election cycle, more so when the name on the White House mailbox is about to change. While politicians in 2008 are offering platitudes about change, they are also wringing their hands over the proliferation of negative campaigning, as though mud-slinging is something we’ve never heard before.

Indeed, two staples of American politics are partisanship and mud-slinging. There’s nothing wrong with either.

American politics has always been partisan, and has, at times, been even dirtier than it is today. Antebellum politics was, with the possible exception of the Era of Good Feelings, even more savage than it is now.

Even before the Constitution, there was partisanship over whether to remain loyal to the British or go independent. Then, in forming our government, there was partisanship over slavery and whether to vest more power in a central government or the individual states.

Almost immediately after the first Congress was sworn in, the Representatives and Senators divided themselves into political parties based on ideological difference. Back then it was the Federalists and Whigs, forerunners to today’s Democrats and Republicans.

In fact, James Madison, the fourth President of the United States, was also the first great partisan, which heightens my respect for James Madison. Here’s what the history book “A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror” says about Madison and partisanship:

“Madison detested compromise that involved abandoning principles, and in any event, thought that the Republic was best served when factions presented extreme differences to the voters, rather than shading their positions toward the middle. The modern moderate voters – so highly praised in the media – would have been anathema to Madison, who wanted people to take sides as a means of creating checks and balances.”

“Madison demanded an intellectual contest of ideas, and recognized that the Constitution’s separation of powers only represented one layer of protections against despotism. The vigorous competition of political parties constituted a much more important safeguard.”

Of course, the faces have changed, the issues have changed, the media have changed, but politics is the same now as it was then. Those who lament the level of partisanship they see in Washington, D.C. simply do not understand or appreciate politics. It’s not for the faint-of-heart.

So now we have Senator Obama calling for an end to partisanship. George W. Bush tried this eight years ago with his “new tone,” which didn’t work, because Democrats responded by being even more spiteful and vitriolic than they were before.

Unfortunately, bipartisanship is almost always detrimental to conservatives. When Republicans attempt bipartisanship, it involves selling out conservatism and giving Democrats what they want, which President Bush did in signing campaign finance reform, the new prescription medicine entitlement, and the bloated education bill that gave us “No Child Left Behind,” to list a few.

When liberals such as Senator Obama talk about bipartisanship, it also means that conservatives have to shut up and cave in. Barack Obama is just as liberal as any of the other Democrats running for president. He has no intention of putting on conservatism in order to get along with the GOP.

In truth, Barack Obama is just as partisan as the rest of them. He may be younger, better-looking, and softer-spoken than most, but he’s no Mr. Nice Guy.

So, when you hear a Republican calling for an end to partisanship, you’ve got someone who is willing to abandon conservatism in exchange for a few complements from the other side. When you hear a Democrat calling for an end to partisanship, you’ve got someone who expects Republicans to abandon conservatism in exchange for a few complements from the other side. Either way, we conservatives lose.

Really, when was the last time a liberal Democrat called for an end to abortion, across-the-board tax cuts, or properly called out global warming as a hoax? Things like that don’t happen. Liberals stick to their ideology like glue. It’s the one thing I admire about them.

Therefore, a partisan environment is the best possible way for conservatism to flourish, and the more partisan, the better. Partisanship has served us quite well for over 200 years. There’s no reason to stop now. Indeed, taking the partisanship out of politics is like taking the tackling out of football. It’s no way to run the country. And if Barack Obama were to win the White House, the honeymoon would last just long enough for him to get his socks into the chest-of-drawers, and the refreshing sounds of mud-slinging and name-calling would ring out all over again.

(Hat tip: Bill Hobbs.)

As I’ve said repeatedly on this blog, global warming is nothing more than a means for liberals to increase government control and raise our taxes. That’s because every “solution” that is proposed to “fix” this hoax involves more government and higher taxes. The latest example of intrusive government in thr name of saving the planet comes via the Left Coast.

What should be controversial in the proposed revisions to Title 24 is the requirement for what is called a “programmable communicating thermostat” or PCT. Every new home and every change to existing homes’ central heating and air conditioning systems will required to be fitted with a PCT beginning next year following the issuance of the revision. Each PCT will be fitted with a “non-removable ” FM receiver that will allow the power authorities to increase your air conditioning temperature setpoint or decrease your heater temperature setpoint to any value they chose. During “price events” those changes are limited to +/- four degrees F and you would be able to manually override the changes. During “emergency events” the new setpoints can be whatever the power authority desires and you would not be able to alter them.

In other words, the temperature of your home will no longer be yours to control. Your desires and needs can and will be overridden by the state of California through its public and private utility organizations. All this is for the common good, of course.

Read more.

Related news story: Congress bans incandescent bulbs

With the exception of Senator Mae Beavers — the Margaret Thatcher of Tennessee politics — my favorite state legislator is without a doubt Representative Stacey Campfield. I head over to his blog every once-in-a-while — more so when the legislature is in session — always with the hand-rubbing anticipation of “What has The Rep done now?”

What he has done is to propose the Rob Briley bill, which states that legislators who have a DUI conviction may not vote on DUI laws. Yes, all you humorless Campfield detractors will no doubt label this a political stunt. But is it too much to ask that those who write the laws the rest of us have to live by must obey the laws themselves?

Campfield observed yesterday that “Rob Briley returned to the house floor for the first time since his crime spree. Upon his entrance he was greeted with a resounding applause. I just shook my head. The last time I saw a cheer like that go out was for Kathrine Bowers after she was bailed out of jail from her bribery charges.”

The Rep also ponders “Isn’t it ironic that in the senate the Democrats are trying to kick Ophelia Ford out of office because she is sick but in the house they are doing all they can to keep Rob Briley in office after his crime spree. I guess it shows what they value and what they don’t.”

“Darwin’s theory is the hoax of the century. It is the religious belief that must be put into children’s heads as early as possible. Everything evil flows from the big lie of evolution. It is all part of the anti-Christian denial of man’s soul that began to gather force in the late nineteenth century, erupting in the next century in Nazi fury and Stalinist gulags. Nothing is true, everything is relative, worship rivers and kill babies. The nihilistic religion of Darwinism is even more implacable than the other religion we must abolish: Islam.” — Ann Coulter, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans, p. 177.