The Paradox and Absurdities of Carbon-Fretting and Rewilding

Herschel Smith · 28 Jan 2024 · 4 Comments

The Bureau of Land Management is planning a truly boneheaded move, angering some conservationists over the affects to herd populations and migration routes.  From Field & Stream. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recently released a draft plan outlining potential solar energy development in the West. The proposal is an update of the BLM’s 2012 Western Solar Plan. It adds five new states—Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming—to a list of 11 western states already earmarked…… [read more]

Ted Cruz To Spearhead Fight Over Internet Control

BY Herschel Smith
7 years, 6 months ago

Newsmax:

Leading the troop of Republican lawmakers, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is inching towards a September showdown with the White House over transfer of internet control, according to The Hill.

“To stop the giveaway of our Internet freedom, Congress should act by continuing and by strengthening the appropriations rider in the continuing resolution that we will be considering this month,” said Cruz.

Cruz has already initiated a website warning about the dangers of the Obama administration’s strategy, Politico reports.

This fight with the current government could be a repeat of the 2013 Obamacare fight, according to The Hill, which threatened to plunge the federal government into a financial crisis after passage of the resolution.

The Texas lawmaker warned it can be dangerous if the U.S. ignored the internet powers it enjoyed as countries like Russia, China and Iran would take over. GOP lawmakers don’t want the Obama administration to surrender its authority to ICANN, the global nonprofit organization that manages the internet’s domain name system.

According to The Hill, few Republicans, however, prefer to stay away from the showdown. House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, are not keen on pursuing the fight to retain internet power.

Go get ’em Ted.  And of course Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan aren’t interested in helping.  They are captains of a den of demons.

As far as I’m concerned, Ted should keep charging until the whole gang of the ne’er-do-wells are hung from the nearest lamp post on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Bad Blood Between Ted Cruz And The Senate

BY Herschel Smith
8 years ago

I had always wondered about a more detailed listing of why the Senate hates Ted Cruz.  NPR tries.

Probably the most awkward question you can ask Republican senators these days is why they’re still giving Ted Cruz the cold shoulder when it comes to endorsements.

“Well, I think you know the answer to that,” said Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma.

“I’m going to let you … speculate about that,” offered Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

“I think it’s pretty obvious,” said Dean Heller of Nevada, without elaborating further.

No, it’s not obvious, jerk off.  I don’t want to speculate – I want you to be man enough to explain in words why you hate the man.

During Cruz’s very first year in the Senate, he and a group of House Republicans helped force a 16-day government shutdown. At the time, in 2013, he crowed about it. But his Senate Republican colleagues were fuming. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire said Cruz had led them on with a promise to defund Obamacare.

“You know, we’ve been asking from the beginning: What’s the end game? How does this end? How do you achieve what you’re purporting to achieve on defunding Obamacare? And I never got an answer to that,” Ayotte told reporters when the government was reopening that October.

And then there was the time Cruz flirted with the idea of defunding the president’s executive action on immigration. He fumbled a procedural maneuver on the Senate floor, which forced his colleagues to come to work on a Saturday. Not the kind of smooth move that will earn one’s way into senators’ hearts.

So let me get this straight.  Cruz is only one man and cannot force a government shutdown forever, but he managed to do it for a while, and you expect that to be some sort of problem for me?  I would have loved it if he had been able to burn down Washington, D.C., and tar and feather you bunch of traitors, but as I said, he’s only one man.  And now we get to the sophomoric.  He forced you to work on a Saturday!?!  A Saturday!?!  Poor babies.  Did you not get to go to your house on the lake that weekend, you sorry collection of bottom-feeding twits?

And then, of course, there was the time Cruz called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar.

Oh, I see.  You only want liars in the Senate, Ted didn’t oblige and he called out the lies.  God almighty.  What a cannibalistic gaggle of gargoyles.  I hate them more every day, and I didn’t think that was possible.

Politics Tags:

Kathleen Parker Is An Imbecile

BY Herschel Smith
8 years, 2 months ago

The Federalist:

Last night on CNN, a panel was discussing an upcoming high feast in our nation’s most practiced religion. I speak, of course, of the Iowa Caucuses and partisan politics. Kathleen Parker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist who appeared on the panel. Her columns are syndicated nationally by The Washington Post and appear in more than 400 media outlets. So I was stunned that she said something so religiously illiterate, on so many different levels. You can watch it here thanks to Ed Stetzer, who posted it, but she says:

One observation. I don’t know… this seems to have slipped through the cracks a little bit but Ted Cruz said something that I found rather astonishing. He said, you know, “It’s time for the body of Christ to rise up and support me.” I don’t know anyone who takes their religion seriously who would think that Jesus should rise from the grave and resurrect himself to serve Ted Cruz. I know so many people who were offended by that comment. And you know if you want to talk about grandiosity and messianic self-imagery I think he makes Ted Cruz makes Donald Trump look rather sort of like a gentle little lamb.

The author, Mollie Hemingway, goes on to explain that this couldn’t possibly mean that Ted Cruz wants Jesus to rise from the grave to endorse him, because Christians believe Jesus is alive.  He is the only risen Lord, King of Kings, Lord of Lords.  Death couldn’t defeat him.  And of course, all of that is true.

But the most ridiculous assertion made by this idiot, Kathleen Parker, is that Ted Cruz wants the body of Christ to endorse him, as in the literal body of Christ!  How such a thing could happen, Kathleen doesn’t say.

Seriously.  This was said on national TV, apparently.  I’m glad that someone watches this shit because I don’t and from time to time we actually need to know how ignorant people are, especially folk inside the beltway.  I do not know who Kathleen Parker is and I don’t read The Washington Post, but it’s a shame that she works in a position of influence.

Of course as most school children know, the “body of Christ” refers to the church.  And Kathleen needs to attend Sunday School a bit to ameliorate her ignorance.

Politics Tags:

Neocons Begin Attacks Against Cruz

BY Herschel Smith
8 years, 3 months ago

This is one reason Neocons hate Ted Cruz.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz says the United States is safer if we leave Bashar Assad in power in Syria.

The GOP presidential hopeful told the Associated Press that while Assad is a “bad man” who has “murdered hundreds of thousands of his own citizens,” toppling him would be “materially worse for U.S. national security interests.”

He faulted the Obama administration as well as one of his Republican rivals, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, for wanting to get rid of the Syrian leader.

“If President Obama and Hillary Clinton and Sen. Rubio succeed in toppling Assad, the result will be the radical Islamic terrorist will take over Syria, that Syria will be controlled by ISIS, and that is materially worse for U.S. national security interests,” Cruz said.

Cruz, who has been gaining some ground in recent polls, also said the United States should not have supported the overthrow of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, or even former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

“If you topple a stable ruler, throw a Middle Eastern country into chaos and hand it over to radical Islamic terrorists, that hurts America,” he said.

Neocons foolishly believe in the export of liberty.  But as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us again, some people don’t want liberty.  They love their enslavement, and Islam is a prime example of the kind of Fascism that comes to dominate a man’s heart, soul and culture.  It cannot coexist with anything.  Only by overthrowing Islam can a country embrace liberty, and so the so-called Green movement in Iraq would have gone to war with the Iranian establishment had the U.S. supported it.  Instead we relegated it to a failing and sidelined movement, destined to perish like every other ideology that met the Mullahs head on.

In the case of Libya and Syria, Cruz knows what the Neocons don’t.  The dictator we know is better than the one we know will come to power in his place, and without the destruction of Islamism in Iran, it’s better to leave well enough alone.  Meddling has produced bad results, and so the meddling should stop.

But Cruz is hated for that and other anti-Neocon positions.  I listened to Brit Hume tonight on Fox News O’Reilly (Hume misspelled Cruz’s name), and Brit was all somber and insistent about Cruz’s upcoming month being an opportunity for the good folks of Iowa to find out what his “real” positions are, and they may not like them.  Positions such as Cruz’s opposition to the NSA spying program, which according to Hume, people may find that they want in the wake of the San Bernardino shootings.

Really, Brit?  Conservatives want larger government programs that enable the Leviathan executive branch to spy on U.S. citizens?  Really?  Is this the great dagger in the heart of Cruz?  Look, we know that the best bet to ameliorate terrorism in America is to close the borders, which runs directly contrary to Rubio’s position.  You won’t have any success convincing us that it’s best to leave the borders open and try to fight them when they get here.  That’s weak tea.  As far as we conservatives are concerned, leave the *.us.gov out of it except to close the borders, and leave our guns alone.  We’ll be just fine.  We’re unimpressed, but I will make a note of the fact that it sounds like you got your talking points from Karl Rove before coming on the air with O’Reilly, who was too stupid to interrupt you and tell you to go back to the drawing board.

Next up is Max Boot, who waxes emotional about Regan’s demeanor.

Like many of his rivals for the Republican nomination, Ted Cruz has embraced the mantle of Ronald Reagan. He regularly cites the Gipper as an inspiration, and last week gave a foreign policy address at the Heritage Foundation that was laced with tributes to him: “As Reagan knew well, the best way to project America’s leadership is by protecting and promoting America’s strength and this principle should always guide our actions.”

I didn’t know Ronald Reagan (neither did Cruz), but I do know a lot about him. And from what I know, it’s fair to say that Ted Cruz is no Ronald Reagan. In many ways, he is actually an anti-Reagan.

Start with tone. Ronald Reagan was famous for espousing the 11th Commandment: “Thou shall not speak ill of any fellow Republican.” Ted Cruz’s entire political career has been founded on speaking ill of fellow Republicans. He has gone so far as to directly and repeatedly attack the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell — a staunch conservative — accusing him of “lying” and of being a “very effective Democratic leader.” He has been equally vitriolic in his attacks on John Boehner, even criticizing him after he had resigned the speakership.

You have got to be kidding me?  In Boot’s alternate universe, McConnell is a “staunch” conservative, and Boehner, old yellowstain himself, is somehow worthy of anything but our most robust disapprobation and insults.  And yet these two quisling traitors are responsible for much of the socialism, crony capitalism, indebtedness, and unfunded liabilities with which our nation is plagued today.

This is rich.  Boot begins with apparently his strongest condemnation of Cruz, which is that Cruz condemns socialism, crony capitalism and debt.  And Boot thinks that this is somehow going to be effective with conservatives.  Again, this is just rich.  But it is telling that it sounds like Boot got his talking points from Karl Rove.

Message to Hume and Boot.  Don’t hang around with Karl Rove.  It’ll prove to be your undoing.  And don’t be persuaded that those outside the beltway think like you do.  We don’t.  You lead the insular life of the effete, inner city dwellers, out of touch with just about everyone except those with whom you dine and discuss.  You should get out a bit more.

Oh, and none of the things Rove has planned for Cruz will change a thing.  Rove is a putz, and you can tell him I said so over dinner.

Politics Tags:

Ted Cruz On Obamacare

BY Herschel Smith
10 years, 6 months ago

There is too much “inside baseball” analysis going around, like this piece at the WSJ by James Taranto.  It’s simplier than it has been made out to be.  The GOP is benefiting from the money flowing in from opposition to Obamacare.  They want to keep that money rolling in.  They think there may actually be a chance to turn back the tide of Obamacare, but only if they let it fully implement and let the public see just how bad it really is.  That will also help the GOP to fill in seats in the House and Senate.  In other words, just like the Democrats, the GOP is taking a scorched earth policy.

But the problem is that Obamacare is going full steam ahead.  My daughter is in medical care, and the implications of Obamacare are catastrophic and disasterous.  I simply do not have the time or space to outline the horror awaiting us, nor would I keep my readers for that long.  Ted Cruz knows that, which is why he is trying to turn it back now, even if only in stages.  In short, he has a soul.  He is more concerned about America than he is his own career.  See Red State for a good writeup.  Professor Jacobson makes the point that we shouldn’t be confused by the parliamentrary tactics.  It’s a necessary part of the game that Cruz is playing.  The bottom line is that most of the Senate doesn’t care about you – but you already knew that.

The others in the Senate (with the exception of Mike Lee) are without scruples.  Harry Reid says that Cruz isn’t doing a real filibuster.  Okay.  Reid doesn’t have a real soul either, and would sell out his own mother to the Nazis in order to keep his place in the Congressional lunch room.  Turning briefly to NRO, Murdock observes that “defeatist Republicans such as Karl Rove, whose massive 2012 campaign spending was only 1.3 percent effective, are rooting against courageous senators Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio who are trying to defund Obamacare right now. A sad caucus of RINOs, moderates, and invertebrates wants to postpone this fight and oppose Obamacare . . . maybe . . . later. Their slogan? Tomorrow is another day, so perhaps we could stop Obamacare then.”

Okay, but he is going easy on Rove.  David Codrea is on target when he calls Rove a wretched cancerous lump.  As for me, the GOP is full of worthless suckholes.  They are dead to me.  Perhaps the best part of the Cruz speech is that the vermin scatter (including the balance of the GOP), and show themselves to be the animals they are.  In case you had any doubts, dear reader, you shouldn’t now.


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