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-D

Daily Yonder has two interesting bits this week:

- SCOTUS overly Eastern, and overly Ivy. With the swirl of barbs and recriminations over Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s U.S. Supreme Court nomination centering on race, little attention is being paid to what is a glaring lack of representation on the high court: Rural America.

- Blue states ignorant of rural issues? Maybe, maybe not. Rep. DeLauro "votes with the left-leaning caucus of her party," notes Cattle Network. And "NAIS is a concept abhorred by small family farmers, about as conservative a group of people as you can find on the American political scene." So the new hero for many rural Americans is a Connecticut Yankee. How about them apples?

Can a Supreme Court and federal agencies (EPA, Interior) lead by a bunch of city folk and beltway politicians fairly represent rural ag and environmental issues? Do they even understand them? [Map source]

Glenn Reynolds once wrote a book called An Army of Davids.  Now there are an army of climate change lobbyists. 

Treehugger:

Everyone loves to hate lobbyists —after all, they seem to embody the special interests and shady dealings that underline the modern perception of politics. A lobbyist for Big Tobacco is about as loved as a killer of puppy dogs. But his station as 'most despicable political figure' could soon be supplanted—by the Climate Lobbyist. This newish breed lobbies against measures to fight climate change on behalf of the likes of oil, electricity, and coal firms. And their numbers are growing. There are now estimated to be around 2,340 climate lobbyists in Washington—more than one for every four members of Congress.

LOL - never heard the climate changers compared to Big Tobacco! 

Anyway, all you evangelical climate deniers out there take heart - you have your own lobbyist.

As Congress debates clean-energy legislation, a conservative Christian group is ramping up lobbying efforts to raise questions about the science of climate change.

The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation Committee recently hired Shannon Royce, a 25-year veteran of conservative organizations including the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, as executive director.

"If you listen to the hype that you will hear in the media, you will hear that evangelicals really feel strongly about global warming, and the impression is that all evangelicals have bought into this global-warming bandwagon, and it simply is not true," Royce said in an interview on a Christian radio station in Chicago.

By the way, my sister and her husband have been lobbyists in state government for years.  I really do get that such folks have their place in influencing policy.

UPDATE: WaTimes:

Democratic lawmakers who spent much of the Bush administration blasting officials for letting energy lobbyists write national policy have turned to a coalition of business and environmental groups to help draft their own sweeping climate bill.

And one little-noticed provision of the draft bill would give one of the coalition's co-founders a lucrative exemption on a coal-fired project it is building.

Hope, change, yada yada...

Iain Murray:

Thankfully, the vast majority of Senators have realized that cap-and-trade is a tax, which is why on April 1 they passed by the margin of 98-0 an amendment to the budget “To protect middle-income taxpayers from tax increases by providing a point of order against legislation that increase taxes on them, including taxes that arise, directly or indirectly, from Federal revenues derived from climate change or similar legislation.”  That amendment essentially recognizes cap-and-trade as a stealth tax, one that Americans for Tax Reform have calculated as amounting to $3000 for each family.

So where does this leave us?  The EPA is announcing that they will hold a knife to the nation’s throat if this tax doesn’t get passed.  There’s responsible government for you!  The intelligent environmentalists at The Breakthrough Institute recognize the folly of this strategy, but, sad to say, intelligent voices in the environmentalist movement are very rarely listened to.

In the face of this assault of Green Taxes, there may be no alternative but to hold a Green Tea Party. 

I can't make this stuff up. Excerpts:

SPOKANE, Wash. – The quest for squeaky-clean dishes has turned some law-abiding people in Spokane into dishwater-detergent smugglers. They are bringing Cascade or Electrasol in from out of state because the eco-friendly varieties required under Washington state law don't work as well. Spokane County became the launch pad last July for the nation's strictest ban on dishwasher detergent made with phosphates, a measure aimed at reducing water pollution.
 
Many people were shocked to find that products like Seventh Generation, Ecover and Trader Joe's left their dishes encrusted with food, smeared with grease and too gross to use without rewashing them by hand. 
 
As a result, there has been a quiet rush of Spokane-area shoppers heading east on Interstate 90 into Idaho in search of old-school suds. Real estate agent Patti Marcotte of Spokane stocks up on detergent at a Costco in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and doesn't care who knows it.
 
"Yes, I am a smuggler," she said.

 

The president is giving away the farm to globalists, but the market is soaring today. What gives? Openmarket.org:

The market may also be getting a boost from the Senate’s earlier vote undercutting the Obama Administration’s proposed $2 trillion cap-and-trade carbon tax, which would impose burdens on the economy akin to Herbert Hoover’s disastrous 1932 Revenue Act at the beginning of the Great Depression.

The Senate today overwhelmingly approved an amendment to the fiscal year (FY) 2010 budget resolution (S. Con. Res. 13) that would prohibit a future cap-and-trade initiative aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from causing higher electricity rates and gas prices for U.S. households and businesses. "The increased utility and fuel costs that would result from cap-and-trade legislation, as proposed by President Obama, would equate to a national sales tax on energy that would affect every family in America," said Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the amendment's sponsor, following the 89 to 8 vote on his proposal. The Senate also adopted a proposal by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) -- largely on party lines -- requiring that revenues obtained from upcoming global warming legislation be used to refund consumers for the price hikes via tax rebates. Boxer's amendment is based on legislation introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) during the previous Congress.

Hmmm. Maybe that whole checks and balances thingy still works.

UPDATE: Not so fast.