Will California Legal Action Give “Cap and Trade” New Life at National Level?

The thing about “cap and trade” legislation is, that it is so chock-full of technical language that is difficult for anyone but a policy wonk to follow. “Global warming” legislation has been shot down in the Congress, but has passed on a statewide level in California. It is taking a long time to implement in the Golden State partially due to the law’s complexity, but also due to the fact that so many groups and individuals are trying to profit from it. The following is an update on California “cap and trade” litigation, and how it has POTENTIAL to bring back the bad science of climate change to nationwide application. This needs watching.

Barack Obama’s “understanding” of all things Muslim

When I was six years old, within a few short months, I went from having perfect vision to being extremely nearsighted. I was discussing that fact with a friend today, and noted that I have no memory of ever having seen well without help from glasses or contacts.

This comment made me realize how little of our childhood sticks with us. As adults, we have few large and coherent memories of our first five years. From the years between six and ten, our memories expand, but they’re still spotty and they’re bounded by the limitations of our child-world, which boils down to school-life, home-life, and the occasional memorable vacation.

I grew up during a time of tremendous social and political upheaval (it was the 1960s and early 1970s, after all), but have only the most limited recollection of that time. What I remember are my teachers (some of them), my school friends (some of them), the continuity of my home life (same mom, same dad, same sister, same house), and the highlights of my life (summers in Tahoe, a Renaissance Faire, my first trip to Disneyland). For me, the Vietnam War boiled down to Walter Cronkite announcing the day’s dead and wounded on the news. The Chicago Democratic Convention, which happened when I was 8, didn’t make it to my radar at all. The hippies, who were a far-reaching social phenomenon, were simply smelly people to me.

I also had such a limited frame of reference that, when I heard information that fell outside my knowledge, I manipulated the information that so that it would mesh with my mental furniture. My favorite example of this is the story of my Dad’s brother; or, rather, how I completely misinterpreted the story of my Dad’s brother. My uncle was, apparently, a genius amongst geniuses. In the years leading up to WWI, many of his teachers at Berlin’s Jewish gymnasium considered him to be the most brilliant student the school had ever produced. Considering that this was a school that, for more than a hundred years had taught the academic Jewish students living in an academic German nation, that was saying a lot.

My uncle lacked drive however and made nothing of his brilliance. Indeed, as I often told my friends, he ended up life as a janitor! One day, when I was already in junior high school, my parents heard me telling this story and were, to say the least, perplexed. It turned out he wasn’t a janitor at all. Instead, he was a low level civil servant in the Danish government. My confusion stemmed from the fact that my parents had given me his job title: “Custodian of Foreign Property” or something like that. In my youthful world, a “custodian” was a “janitor” — and so a story was born.

I wasn’t unique in that I really didn’t “get” what was going on around me, or that I put my own child-like spin on things. The other night, when my husband went to kiss our 11 year old son goodnight, he found him punching himself in the stomach. In response to a query from my husband, my son announced that Mom had told him that, if he wanted to get good stomach muscles, he should sock himself in the stomach. My husband came to me to investigate this peculiar piece of body-building advice, and learned what I had really said: “One of the good ways to improve your muscle tone (and get the six pack abs my son so desperately desires), is to suck in your stomach when you walk around.”

(I call this active walking, meaning that you simply keep your abs engaged as part of regular movement. Up until two pregnancies wrecked havoc with my abdominal muscles, I could have been on the cover of one of those ab workout videos, so I know this technique works.)

Children are bright, observant and absorptive. They also do not know how to process all of the information they take in, they do not always understand the information headed their way and, by the time they are adults, they’ve forgotten large chunks of their childhood. That’s normal. The developing brain is a wondrous thing, but it’s not a fully functional thing. Also, as my little “janitor”/”custodian” story shows, children live in a very small world. Their understanding is bounded only by their immediate knowledge.

Think about how children understand their little world, and then think about Barack Obama. He lived in Indonesia from the time he was six until he was nine or ten. He was part of an expatriate community, and went to a slightly more ecumenical school than would be the norm in a Muslim country. Also, he was in an East Asian, not an Arab, Muslim country, one that, even today, is somewhat liberal by Muslim standards( starting with the fact that the women traditionally did not wear veils there). His exposure to a rather singular type of Islam occurred at a time in his life when he was processing experiences through a very narrow, youthful frame of reference.

Nevertheless, David Ignatius assures us that this limited exposure, during a time in life when even the brightest child isn’t tracking things that well, makes Obama a Middle East expert:

As President Obama watched events unfold this past week in Egypt and the surrounding Arab world, he is said to have reflected on his own boyhood experiences in Indonesia — when the country was ruled by a corrupt, authoritarian leader who was later toppled by a reform movement.

Obama looks at the Egyptian drama through an unusual lens. He has experienced dictatorship first-hand, a world where “the strong man takes the weak man’s land,” as he quoted his Indonesian stepfather in his autobiography. The president came of age reading Frantz Fanon and other theorists of radical change. He is sometimes described as a “post-racial” figure, but it’s also helpful to think of him as a “post-colonial” man.

Based upon my memories of my own childhood, and my day-to-day observations of the children with whom I spend a great deal of time today, Ignatius’ take is just horse pucky. Unless Obama was a political savant, he was almost certainly unaware of or had, at most, limited awareness of the political and social dynamics in Indonesia.

It’s entirely possible that, as Obama grew older, his exposure to Indonesia as a child meant that, as an adult, he paid attention to Indonesian politics. That would make sense. But to say, as Ignatius does, that Obama, the former community organize, has the innate ability to negotiate the pitfalls of this Egyptian revolution because he lived in Indonesia when he was 7 or 8 years old is nothing more than an insult to our intelligence.

British Public Schools to Push Homosexual Curriculum

The totalitarian moonbattery that holds sway in British public schools has taken the final plunge into absurdity with a curriculum that features gay math, geography, and science. No matter what the subject, kids will be taught to revere the depraved and disease-spreading homosexual lifestyle. Examples:

Maths — teaching statistics through census findings about the number of homosexuals in the population, and using gay characters in scenarios for maths problems;

Design and technology— encouraging pupils to make symbols linked to the gay rights movement;

Science — studying animal species where the male takes a leading role in raising young, such as emperor penguins and sea horses, and staging class discussions on different family structures, including same-sex parents;

Geography — examining the transformation of San Francisco’s Castro district in the 1960s from a working-class Irish area to the world’s first “gay neighbourhood”, and considering why homosexuals move from the countryside to cities;

Languages — using gay characters in role play scenarios, and teaching “LGBT vocabulary”.

At least that last one should clue kids in as to what “mainstream” media figures like Anderson Cooper mean when they smirkingly denounce patriots as “teabaggers.”

As for tikes too young to comprehend these lessons,

the plans will suggest using images of same sex couples and also promoting books such as “And Tango Makes Three”, which is about two male penguins raising a young chick, inspired by actual events at New York’s Central Park Zoo.

It goes without saying that no one who isn’t profoundly sick would want to promote homosexual perversion to children. But in the final ghastly stages of cultural suicide by liberalism, profoundly sick is the new normal.

4 Reasons Why the MSM Botched the Tuscon Massacre, and Why they Owe the Victims and Sarah Palin an Apology

[H/T Toby Toons for the image.] This past week in the wake of the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords by Jared Lee Loughner (that killed six people and wounded nine others–including the congresswoman), the mainstream/liberal media instantly pounced on “the violent rhetoric” by Sarah Palin and the Tea Party as the cause of Loughner’s mad [...]

Bill Maher Thinks You’re Stupid

This past Friday night, Bill Maher broke with tradition. Instead of just having a panel composed of three Leftist yes men who hang on his every word, Maher had a panel of two conservatives (Andrew Breitbart and Amy Holmes) and one progressive (Seth MacFarlane, the creator of The Family Guy). Things were humming along quite [...]

6 New Rules to Fight the Left: Maher’s Attacks on O’Donnell Bring Out the Mama Grizzly

Most people who don’t live in a cave are probably somewhat familiar with the left’s recent attacks on Christine O’Donnell. First, it was that she was against masturbation in 1995, now it’s that she dabbled in witchcraft when she was in high school. (No, seriously, I’m not making this stuff up–these people are just that [...]

Tim Scott Celebrates His Birthday…And a Whole Lot More

[The above photo is of me and Tim Scott.] This past Friday evening, a party was thrown in honor of Tim Scott’s forty-fifth birthday. As many of you are already aware, Mr. Scott recently won the Republican nomination for South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District after a grueling and hard-fought race–therefore, this party was long over [...]

3 Reasons Why BlogCon is Made of Awesome

[The above photo is of me and Vodkapundit--aka, Stephen Green.] This past weekend, FreedomWorks put on a national blogger conference in Washington D.C. called BlogCon, that was open to all bloggers who wanted to attend. Tabitha Hale, the brains behind BlogCon who put the whole thing together, really outdid herself. (All attendees should participate in [...]

Using our Rights against Our Own: The 9-11 Mosque and Religious Rights

       There is one consistent factor of our society which we are seeing more and more: Using our rights against ourselves in order to protect others.  A great recent example is the 9-11 Mosque.  Almost daily, people are debating the 9-11 Mosque and whether it should be placed two blocks where terrorists involved in the [...]

Horrible Tech Problems

As you may have noticed, the “Latest Headlines” area isn’t updating and every post is by “Lori Ziganto.” As you may have guessed, it’s a tech problem. It was caused by a change I had made on the server side last night in an effort to make RWN better able to withstand large traffic hits. I’ve [...]

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