The Source

Environmentalism Trumps Common Sense

Finally, someone in a position of authority has pointed out that radical environmentalists have been at the center of The Great Man-Made Flood of 2011.

Missouri Levee & Drainage District Association Chairman Tom Waters is accusing the environmentalists of pushing policies on the Army Corps of Engineers that contribute to the Great Flood of 2011. He says when the flooding subsides, there may be a backlash against the movement because of that.

Waters charges environmentalists had too much influence in the development of the Corps 2004 Master Plan for the Missouri River… He believes flood control and other river management elements have been pushed aside.

His assessment is spot on, although any backlash will be among average citizens and will have no impact on the resolve of the environmentalists or the management of the Missouri River. As American Thinker point out:

The Missouri River Recovery and Implementation Committee has seventy members.  Only four represent interests other than environmentalism.  The recommendations of the committee, as one might expect, have been somewhat less than evenhanded.

When 66 of the 70 members of the Missouri River Committee are environmentalists pursuing the same goal - which is to allow the river to flood year after year without protections - bad things are bound to happen along the Missouri. Just don’t tell the environmentalists that…

A spokesman for the Kansas Sierra Club, Bill Griffith, called Waters’ claim “laughable”.

“To say that we’re the puppet masters, holding the strings of the Corps, well, we didn’t get that memo,” Griffith told KMBC.

But that’s simply not true at all. The Sierra Club may not be the “puppet masters”, but they and others are unequivocally mandating the actions of the Army Corps of Engineers (among others) in any and every way that they can, most notably through activist judges in the judicial system.

Case in point: When the Army Corps went to New Orleans to reinforce the levees in the years before Hurricane Katrina, they were sued by the Sierra Club over possible damage that might be caused to the fish and algae near the levees. Three times the Corps tried to reinforce levees they knew to be dangerously in need of repairs, and three times they were sued successfully by the Sierra Club, blocking the (obviously) necessary work they needed to carry out.

(The media explicitly ignored this relatively important aspect of the story. It didn’t fit with their “blame Bush” rhetoric.)

The levees failed and New Orleans was devastated, with nearly a thousand dead and tens of thousands displaced and left with nothing. And the environmentalist Sierra Club is 100% responsible for those tragedies and deaths. They chose the protection of algae over a major American city and human lives.

The Sierra Club and groups like it consistently push radical environmentalism, and now that mindset is costing Midwest farmers billions in lost land and crops, wiping out towns along the river, closing down major highways, and is wreaking havoc on local economies.

Bill Griffith and the rest of the radical environmentalist crowd should realize there’s nothing remotely “laughable” about the damage they continue to inflict on this country.

- B.H.

Governing by Veto

Governor Jay Nixon busted out that veto pen again, this time to nix legislation that passed with overwhelming bi-partisan support. The bill in question would have kept Missouri from being penalized by the GOP for holding its presidential primary too early; doing so by moving it back a month, into March.

Republicans say Gov. Jay Nixon's veto of an elections bill has made Missouri "irrelevant" in the presidential nominating process and should be overridden by the state Legislature.

National party rules say that only four states — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — can hold caucuses or primary elections before the beginning of March… States that break the rule can be punished by having their delegations cut in half at party conventions. That, in turn, could prompt presidential contenders to ignore Missouri during the campaign season.

It’s no surprise that Nixon wouldn’t mind having Missouri take a back seat during this election cycle, considering the presidential primary only includes Republican candidates. Still, it marginalizes the entire state he serves by making Missouri far less important to the group of candidates that could easily produce the next President.

(Begging the question: Would he have vetoed a similar bill in an election cycle that was selecting a Democratic nominee?)

Also no surprise is that he opposed another of the bill’s important provisions, which would strip the “special appointment” powers the Governor currently enjoys for filling vacant statewide offices in favor of filling those seats by special election. He singled out his opposition to that portion of the bill in a half-hearted attempt to seem as though he supported the overall legislation while taking the veto pen to it anyway.

Nixon [said] that while he supported the presidential primary date change, the bill contained other provisions he deemed "unacceptable."

…Republicans [said] Nixon should have weighed in while the bill was being written.

It takes a true politician to claim to back the bill that he throws out, all while offering no leadership or communication of any sort during the drafting process… though that’s not exactly unusual with Jay Nixon. He likes to have his cake and eat it, too.

There are already enough votes in the Senate to override the veto during their September session. The House needs 109 total votes to seal the override… and it passed the House in May with 137. That math is not in the Nixon’s favor.

Touring natural disasters, feigning support of bills he suppresses, and governing by veto: Jay Nixon’s new M.O.

- B.H.

Jay Nixon Will Be There...

 

The Death of NASA, Brought to You by Obama/McCaskill

As NASA’s final Space Shuttle mission prepped for launch to the International Space Station, Claire McCaskill was sounding off on what is shaping up to be America’s final fleeting moments of dominance in space. Although, instead of marking the sad occasion with recognition of all that NASA and the shuttle missions have accomplished over the years and the American lives sacrificed along the way, she regurgitated the same tired Obama line about moving into a future without NASA’s dominance in space.

Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill said this could open the door for private, government-subsidized aerospace companies to make their first forays beyond the Earth’s atmosphere…

“I think you’re still going to see a very aggressive space program, it’s just going to be fashioned differently in terms of a public-private partnership,” McCaskill said.

Obama cut $20 billion from NASA’s budget, ending the Constellation program, nixing George W. Bush’s planned return trip to the moon, and putting literally the greatest minds of our time on the unemployment line.

The President and other McCaskill-minded Democrats claimed the $20 billion cut to NASA was a move to reducing the national debt. To put that number into perspective, $20 billion is roughly what the military spent last year in Iraq and Afghanistan just on air conditioning, or in relation to the national debt is just 0.004% of the $5 trillion Obama has added to the debt since assuming office two and a half years ago.

Gutting NASA’s budget did absolutely nothing to make a dent in the debt. You couldn’t even call it a drop in the bucket.

And who, exactly, is funding and running the private companies that Barack and Claire believe will take us into the next era of space exploration? The same ultra-rich entrepreneurs and investors that McCaskill and the Obama Administration have declared class warfare on, that’s who.

If the Left is going to crucify “private jet owners”, how exactly they come down on the side of private spaceship owners is a mystery.

- B.H.

Playing Politics with the Vote on Votes

As an American citizen, you must have a government-issued ID in order to drive, fly, purchase alcohol and cigarettes, buy a house, get a loan, rent a car or apartment or hotel room, and qualify for government assistance, among other things. But should we really not be required to provide the same identification in order to vote?

That’s exactly what the opponents of the Voter ID bill would lead you to believe, and they are suing to keep it from being voted on. Ironic, no?

Opponents of a voter photo identification requirement have filed a lawsuit seeking to strike a proposed constitutional amendment from Missouri's 2012 ballot…

The lawsuit lists eight plaintiffs - including elderly, disabled, immigrant and student voters - who assert that they don't have valid government-issued photo IDs and would be burdened if they had to try to obtain the documents necessary to get a state identification card.

Arguing that the Voter ID bill specifically disenfranchises the poor and elderly (and somehow minorities) may be popular with the elitist crowd, but large percentages of these segments of the population are on some form of government assistance, assistance which requires the same identification verifications with loads of paperwork to boot; so the argument that a voter ID bill would place an unfair burden on these people is dishonest at best and a bald-faced lie at its worst. If it were really an unfair burden Liberals would be fighting against IDs (and the red tape they usually love so much) in every facet of our lives.

Like all American citizens, these supposedly “disenfranchised” voters are plenty used to being required to present identification and provide documentation on a regular basis.

"You can't function in today's society without a photo ID and I think using that at the ballot box is reasonable and rational," said [State Sen. Bill] Stouffer, R-Napton. "I don't think it's a barrier, I think it's a guarantee that you are who you say you are."

It would be curious as to why the Left singles out voting among all of the other ID-required situations if the game they’re playing weren’t so obvious. But our voting system should not be a free-for-all, assuming it’s as important a Constitutional right as we’ve been taught it to be.

In a time where most Americans are walking around with pocket-sized computers, asking them to carry a plastic card with their picture on it is nothing to balk at.

- B.H.

McCaskill-Backed Stimulus an Epic Failure

On the eve of the long holiday weekend, the Obama administration released their typical “the-press-will-ignore-these-Friday-numbers” information dump. If you look at what these stats bring to light it’s really no surprise.

The “numbers” in question are in regards to the $666 billion Obama stimulus package, enthusiastically supported by Claire McCaskill, which now verify what Conservatives have been arguing for years: that the stimulus package was a colossal failure, so much so that it is literally doing more harm than good to the economy.

Crunching the numbers, the Weekly Standard points out some shocking statistics:

The report was written by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, a group of three economists who were all handpicked by Obama, and it chronicles [that] the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job. 

And it gets worse:

…the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the “stimulus,” and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead… over the past six months, the economy would have added or saved more jobs without the “stimulus” than it has with it… the “stimulus” has been working in reverse over the past six months, causing the economy to shed jobs.

Claire McCaskill not only was a staunch advocate of the stimulus, but she has recently touted its supposed achievements, which she called “wildly successful.” The definition of “wild success” must be wildly different in Liberal dictionaries than everyone else’s.

Lloyd Smith, Executive Director of the Missouri Republican Party, went on the offensive:

By all accounts, the McCaskill-backed stimulus has failed. It failed to keep the unemployment rate below 8% as promised, it failed to create ‘shovel-ready’ jobs as promised, and too many Americans still cannot find work… Still, Claire McCaskill and the Democrats are living in denial. Only a Democrat like Claire McCaskill could believe that borrowing and spending more than a quarter of a million dollars to create a single job could make a government program ‘wildly successful.’

Unemployment was at 7.3% when this debate was underway. It is now 9.1%, and the national debt has increased from $10 trillion to $15 trillion in the same period of time.

Not surprisingly, the Weekly Standard sums things up best:

All sides agree on these incriminating numbers — and now they also appear to agree on this important point: The economy would now be generating job growth at a faster rate if the Democrats hadn’t passed the “stimulus."

Apparently, these days, vindication comes at a cost of half a trillion bucks. Here’s hoping it’s a little cheaper next time.

- B.H.

Flooded Farms Targets for Army Corps

As historic flooding slowly tears through Missouri one county at a time, the outcry over mismanagement by the Army Corps of Engineers has been growing louder and louder. Now it appears that they have added salt to the wound.

A recent letter sent out [from the Army Corps] to farmers in Missouri and Iowa who own land in the Missouri River basin asked them if they are interested in selling their land.

The federal government offering to buy land that has been laid to waste by a flood many believe its gross mismanagement caused in the first place is yet another embarrassment to the Army Corps and nothing short of insulting to every recipient of this “offer.”

The letter and the current water flow coming out of Gavins Point Dam in South Dakota has caused regional farmers to lose faith in the corps, some say. “Maybe that’s the problem with the corps,” [area director of the Missouri Association of Soil and Water Conservation Districts Bruce] Biermann said. “They don’t know what’s going on.”

To some farmers, it seems as if the government is putting animal habitats as a priority over human life and property. Blake Hurst, president of the Missouri Farm Bureau, believes the government’s priorities need to be reassessed.

Landowners along the river have been quietly griping about this for weeks now, but as the news made its way around the Midwest, mostly by word of mouth, it finally gained enough steam to be picked up by the media, and likewise our elected officials.

Congressman Sam Graves said he was shocked... “It’s a slap in the face to a lot of people who are battling floodwaters right now,” Mr. Graves said. “The timing of this letter could not be worse. We have a deficit and this is a program we can do without. The federal government already owns one out of every five acres in the United States. We don’t need more land.”

Trying for some good PR in this mess, the Army Corps noted that it will pay “fair market value” for the land. But the “fair market value” will be determined by appraising the flooded land after the waters have receded, likely months from now. How much will that farmland be worth once it’s left covered in several feet of sand and silt? Certainly not what it was worth a few months ago.

In the middle of one of the worst economic periods our country has ever faced, is it really a good time to put the screws to our farmers, of all people?

- B.H.

Celebrating Independence

As we celebrate our 235^th year of Independence this coming weekend with fireworks and apple pie, it's important to take a moment and give thanks for the soldiers who have made up the backbone of our country for nearly two and a half centuries, and to say a prayer for the safety of our troops fighting for freedom overseas and around the world.

Have a happy and safe holiday weekend.