Let me try again
Watts up With That reports that the French have ruled a proposed carbon tax scheduled to start on Jan 1, 2010 to be unconstitutional. Here are more details:
Here’s a Deustch-Welle news article on the reversal.
France’s Constitutional Council says the country’s proposed carbon tax is illegal. This is a severe blow to French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plans to fight climate change.
France’s Constitutional Council has struck down a carbon tax that was planned to take effect on January 1st. The council, which ensures the constitutionality of French legislation, said too many polluters were exempted in the measure and the tax burden was not fairly distributed.
It was estimated that 93 percent of industrial emissions outside of fuel use, including the emissions of more than 1,000 of France’s top polluting industrial sites, would be exempt from the tax, which would have charged 17 euros per ton of emitted carbon dioxide.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has argued the tax is necessary to combat climate change and reduce the country’s dependence on oil.
However, the council’s ruling is a severe blow to both Sarkozy’s environmental plan as well as France’s budget for 2010. The government now has to find a way to come up with about 4.1 billion euros in revenue that was expected from the tax.
The tax appears to have been found defective on narrow grounds and does not on the face of it appear to be a rejection the ideas on which the tax is based. The Guardian reports that its advocates have vowed to try again. The socialists chortled in glee, not at the defeat of the carbon tax, but Sarkozy’s failure to pass it.
Scrambling to salvage a project which the President had vigorously defended against criticism from opposition politicians, green groups and members of his own party, the government insisted today the carbon tax had not been put off for good. “It is a tough fight, but a worthwhile one,” said spokesman Luc Chatel. Ministers promised a revised text within weeks.
However, there was little the government could do to distract from the humiliation of having a much-trailed reform batted back by the sages of the august constitutional council.
Nor will the hopes of a new and improved plan do much to calm heightening worries over revenue. Even if a revised proposal is made, the tax – which was expected to raise €1.5bn (£1.34bn) during 2010 – will take weeks to reach parliament again and even longer to start boosting state coffers.
The opposition Socialist party made no secret of their glee at seeing the right-wing president fall at the final hurdle of his marathon battle to introduce a tax which was opposed by two-thirds of the public.
Maybe it’s all about money. And it does suggest the fatal equation that must never be drawn in the public’s mind. AGW=Tax.
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It matters not whether the French Constitution is violated. The French Republic is no longer a sovereign Westphalian nation-state. If Paris is unable to ram this tax down French throats, Brussels will.
But the American Republic is in much the same sad shape.
I don’t know. From friends I hear the French can be rather fussy about which laws they will obey and tend to ignore a fair amount of them. The small town and rural inhabitants are rumored to have some rather oily patches in their gardens.
Whenever they say “It isn’t about the money” It is about the money. Barney Franks and his pirate crew have specialized in the Ex Post Facto Law and the Bill of Attainder. Special taxes to be levied only against corporate officers whose previously legal conduct, like contributing to Republicans, have brought purple shirted protestors on their lawns.
What kind of world do we live in where the politicians are pushing agendas that two thirds of their electorate are against? And are the Socialists against the proposals or just against anything a so-called right winger is for? Interesting times indeed… The world is ravenously hungry for an existential showdown. Everybody is preparing for a fight from Iran to Brussels. Maybe it is just a part of human nature that we must kill one another from one generation to another for no particular reason and it can not be put off.
Al Gore makes great hay about all the “peer reviewed” research that backs up anthropogenic global warming, but that really amounts to “theologically reviewed”. If your work appears in “Nature” that’s the same thing as getting the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur on your analysis of the Church Fathers. What really counts in science is repeatability. The “Hockey Stick” temperature chart that Al Gore waves around had already been discounted by scientists who didn’t cherry pick the data, and climategate was merely confirmation. The best data shows that the Nineteen Fifties, not the Naughty Aughties, were the warmest decade on record, and if temps climbed from 1975 to 1998 it was a temporary fluctuation in a long term cooling trend. The science that “proved” a coming ice age (heralded in 1974 by Time and Newsweek) has not been validated. Turning carbon into a “sin” and proposing to tax it is the biggest attempted larceny in history.
http://www.la-croix.com/documents/doc.jsp?docId=2387113&rubId=47605
where the carbon taxe is already applied
Now, that was the most silly thing that Sarkozy undertook, and the project was too complicated to work, it would have added too much administrative calculs. Also it was taxing our nuclear electricity, and our refined oil, that is one of the most taxed in EU… so it’s evident that the people didn’t agree.
I think more than 75% of the French were against it, not only the Socialists.
Also they can re-propose the project, but I expect that industrial lobbies, and trucks will make obstruction, in paralysing the country, because in the first place they are the ones that should have been taxed.
You can’t always get what you want.
(wait, didn’t I just hear that recently?)
http://www.lepoint.fr/actualites-economie/2009-12-30/taxe-carbone-interview-gilles-carrez-ump-ecrire-un-nouveau-texte-va-etre-tres/916/0/409406
This man says a new law is impossible
I’m still laughing, the greenies must be red !
The whole Global Warming thing is a wank and it may well be coming unstuck for both scientific and economic reasons.
Exempting major industries (aka polluters) from the immediate impact made the whole ETS thing more palatable by delaying most of the horrific economic impacts.
Without those exemptions/delays the immediate impacts are in your face and the full horror must be obvious even to John Q Public.
This decision of the French court may be a very good thing, especially so soon after the failure of Copenhagen and the revelations of skulduggery at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.
“What kind of world do we live in…?”
I’d call it a Neo-Imperial world. Well, maybe not exactly, the system has no emperor (yet), but his Imperial Court is already coalescing. These masters of mankind are akin to those former aristocrats and Court Viziers who held themselves aloft without a shred of accountability to anyone below their airy perches. Democracy? In the end that’s just the trick that lets these thieves loot the countryside to install themselves.
It’s been at least a century in the making, but 2009 saw a stampede towards this monstrosity with the elevation of BHO and his transnational cabal of Europhilic antiAmerican scum with their AGW One-World-Governance initiatives and their supranational NGO/UN schemes. This coterie of Socialist filth joins the other world tyrants and dictator-wannabees who have always eschewed democracy.
There is nothing to be lamented about a legal ruling saying that a tax is too limited in its application – remember that in any democratic (or semi-democratic) society the easiest way to pass any tax bill is to make sure it only applies to a portion of the population while you exempt as many powerful players and interest groups as you need for support. They of course will almost always support any tax that applies only to “other people” and not to them – such a tax is even better than a direct government subsidy since it’s hidden.
So what happens when there is a ruling that says a tax is not applied widely enough? All the powerful interests who supported the tax because they had managed to wrangle exemptions for themselves all of a sudden see the tax with new eyes, the eyes of people who will be paying for it. Their support vanishes overnight, and with a widely based tax it quickly becomes impossible to muster majority support.
Not to mention that after the failure of Copenhagen, every industrialist in France now realizes that they will be burdening their own ability to export while China and India are able to produce whatever with no restrictions or extra costs at all. And they cannot do unilateral trade restrictions since they are bound by the E.U.
Odds are that this tax is dead. Perhaps something small and ineffective will be passed in it’s place just to allow Sarkozy to save face, but even that is questionable. Sarkozy needs to seriously think about his plans to raise taxes of any kind while the economy is still on such thin ice.
meanwhile, in honor of the occasion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5ea44njRTw&feature=player_embedded
The carbon tax against the law?
The law then must be changed
The object is to bleed them raw
So things must be arranged
So that the folks are bled to death
So that the earth may live
And taxing every exhaled breath
Is what they have to give
We greenies know what must be done
We know what’s good for all
We know that warmth comes from the sun
As Winter follows Fall
We know the warming scare’s a laugh
We smile at carbon tax
That’s how we write the epitaph
And then the Euro Pax
Whatever the stated reason I think the people who pull the strings in France are looking for a way to climb down from this. I suspect similar action will occur elsewhere and this will all be put on the shelf to be quietly forgotten.
But, Thrasymachus, this whole global warming thing must not be quietly forgotten because it is/was a symptom of the underlying disease, not the diseasse itself which is still much with us.
hmmm…interesting idea, thinking about the constitutionality of things. we oughtta try that again!
If you haven’t seen it yet, I enthusiastically recommend this detailed deconstruction of the manmade cult: Announcing The Timeline, “ClimateGate: 30 years in the making”.
Of course, the conspirators who dreamed up this myth and built it carefully, “scientific” lie by lie, wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if there hadn’t already been a huge audience who tend to think of man’s progress as a shame, even of humanity itself as an unfortunate virus infecting the planet.
Of course, in the US the SCOTUS decided, against all facts and logic, that CO2 is a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
Maybe some French courts aren’t as infected by PC and progressivism as is the US judiciary?
I don’t even blink anymore at bad science, claims that bs is science, fraud, gibberish, numbers that don’t add up, barking moonbats getting the Nobel Prize for their insufferable ignorance, … congrats to the french, their courts have always been more finders of facts than ours, perhaps their senior judges are less senile?
[O/T] Rush taken to hospital with chest pains. [ http://2su.de/WCQ ]
No further details at this time.
O/T, I know but…..
Read “Wither Sovereignty” from Threats Watch.
Back at “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” thread someone mentioned this. If Shippert is right then ‘RED FLAG’ is apropos.
“I will not submit”
&
“I aim to misbehave”
Here come the war crimes trials and the gun grabs.
LOTM – I am sorry about your friend. More than you know. I have lost a 17 y.o. terrier mix in the past. They are “angels with paws”. In my vets office is a poster of 5 or 6 dogs sitting on an SUV tailgate with the caption: “You can tell a lot about someone by the friends they choose.” I think it was referring to the dogs choosing someone not the other way around.
I have two Petit Basset Griffon Vendeen’s (PBGV’s) that allow me to care for them. My Jasmin is the happiest creature on the face of the Earth ……. except for things that go ‘BANG’.
Listening to:
The pieces keep falling into place. I for one never thought that the demise of a great nation would take the form it has, nor it’s descent into depravity be so swift.
Somewhat O/T, but I didn’t know where else to post this. I offer it as a 44th Presidential Psalm.
When the government is my shepherd
I shall always want.
They take away all the green in my pastures,
They demand all other voices be still,
They corrupt our souls.
Congress takes crooked paths
for its own gains’ sake.
Even when Medical Review Boards
Condemn me to the valley of the shadow of death,
I will not fear to resist their evil,
For the Constitution is with me,
Though courts and agencies’ staff
Discomfort me.
They weaken the military
in the presence of our enemies.
They refuse to drill for our own oil.
My tax burden overflows.
Goodness and mercy will follow me
All the days of my life,
Only if I rely on myself and trust in the Lord
Forever.
Walt and Batman. Excellence.
And of course Richard’s Belmont.
What more could we ask for to sooth our worried minds?
Our Dogs and Cats of course and Horses and other angels in disguise that will always comfort and love us.
And once in a blue moon a human friend that doesn’t ever ask for anything but is always willing to help you anytime, anywhere.
And Children, Always the Children.
Papa Ray
Les deux milliards payés par les ménages devaient être reversés. Mais l’autre moitié payée par les entreprises devait rester dans les caisses de l’État et compenser la baisse de la taxe professionnelle.
“The two billion paid by households should be reversed. But the other half paid by the companies should remain in state coffers and offset the decline in business tax.”
So the state was cheating, it supressed one tax, the business tax, with the argument that it presses on the enterprises, also requested by the enterprises for years, and the clever enarques schemed to replace it under a screen of “good intentions”, the religion of global warming, that the whole population would have had to pay : this is where Sarkozy isn’t honnest, and I guess he is going to loose the next elections for that !
Segolene Royal who was the main politician contestator for the carbon tax, has already replaced it by a new tax for the enterprises and stores in our region, a tax on neon signs. Apparently she isn’t the lonely one at the head of a Region that decreated it. (It was in the drawers, and each region was free to use it)
http://www.lavoixeco.com/actualite/Secteurs_activites/Commerces_et_Distribution/2009/04/20/article_impot-sur-les-grandes-enseignes-les-com.shtml
The solution would be to reduce the State and regional standings of administration, but I don’t expect that is coming soon
OT
TSA subpoenas bloggers, demands names of sources
TSA special agents served subpoenas to travel bloggers Steve Frischling and Chris Elliott, demanding that they reveal who leaked the security directive to them. The government says the directive was not supposed to be disclosed to the public.
Frischling said he met with two TSA special agents Tuesday night at his Connecticut home for about three hours and again on Wednesday morning when he was forced to hand over his lap top computer. Frischling said the agents threatened to interfere with his contract to write a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines if he didn’t cooperate and provide the name of the person who leaked the memo.
“It literally showed up in my box,” Frischling told The Associated Press. “I do not know who it came from.” He said he provided the agents a signed statement to that effect.
for those that like history on WWII, here is something on Jean Moulin (in english)
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/2509/full
Bob Murphy: This decision of the French court may be a very good thing, especially so soon after the failure of Copenhagen and the revelations of skulduggery at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.
All the Cool Kids in Europe were on board the anthropogenic global warming fad, and the Donks in this country had to try to be like them, but now that the gig is up it’s a scramble to retain export market share against up and comers like China and India. There are moves by some Democrats to change course, but the inertia of trying to be one of the Cool Kids, which always leaves the US 180 degrees out of phase with the “world consensus”, may be too much to save them in November 2010.;
Fearful of a backlash against the costly healthcare overhaul and bracing for huge losses in the 2010 elections, Democratic leaders are urging the Obama White House to abandon efforts to pass a cap-and-trade bill next year.
Tony: Of course, the conspirators who dreamed up this myth and built it carefully, “scientific” lie by lie, wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if there hadn’t already been a huge audience who tend to think of man’s progress as a shame, even of humanity itself as an unfortunate virus infecting the planet.
Anthropogenic Global Warming is a flimsy rationalization for laws to transfer wealth and power from those deemed politically incorrect, to those deemed politically correct. It is a program akin to the Islamic Jizra, the tax on the non-Muslim people of the Book. The impious are to be physically humiliated and forced to pay tribute to the politically correct. The politically correct will fly above the heads of the politically incorrect in private jets to climate summits that emit tens of thousands of tons of carbon, like Al Gore, while the politically incorrect will go on public transport. AGW is a religion that, like Islam or Socialism, justifies the exercise of state power to take other people’s freedom and wealth.
Teresita 26/27
Nice synopsis. That encapsulates this global political insanity that we are witnessing now pretty good! A new self proclaimed ecological Caliphate is being born right before our eyes. The firstest with the mostest BS has laid claim but the governments that can back up their immodest rights with guns will win out in the newly minted transnational world order. Of course this only applies to failed democracies in the US and the EU but none the less all of the Cool Cats want a piece of it. It really makes you go back to questioning exactly what is the federal government’s role in our life is, where its special privileges lie and what are left to the state and the individual, if anything. It brings us back to the Magna Carta long before there was a US constitution and delineates the rights of nobility. Boy I hate revisionism also known as hope and change.
1) Happy New year to all the crew of the good ship Belmont Club. Hope it is a better year next year,
2) I was still an academic when climate change crooks just</i? started to creep into academia, and that was 25-30 years ago, It was still very much in the fringes, but I do recall the people involved and the malarkey they espoused raising my hackles. At that time serious people in serious sciences thought it was a joke, just another PC raid of the public grant purse. I remember though that the whole business did briefly seT my attennae to tingling. There was really something odd about the intensity of it all and the ease they had of getting grants for what at the time did not even begin to look like any sort of real science–they did not yet even have their "coputer models".
It was, however, during the Clinton years that the deck stacking and the grant packing started in earnest. Even Nasa got involved. It is no wonder that Gore became the major spokesman of the climate change crowd.
1) Happy New year to all the crew of the good ship Belmont Club. Hope it is a better year next year,
2) I was still an academic when climate change crooks just started to creep into academia, and that was 25-30 years ago, It was still very much in the fringes, but I do recall the people involved and the malarkey they espoused raising my hackles. At that time serious people in serious sciences thought it was a joke, just another PC raid of the public grant purse. I remember though that the whole business did briefly seT my attennae to tingling. There was really something odd about the intensity of it all and the ease they had of getting grants for what at the time did not even begin to look like any sort of real science–they did not yet even have their “computer models”.
It was, however, during the Clinton years that the deck stacking and the grant packing started in earnest. Even Nasa got involved. It is no wonder that Gore became the major spokesman of the climate change crowd.
O/T
I’m confused. Reading the comments on Democratic Underground about Limbaugh’s hospitalization; the mockers kept trying to imply he had a heart attack from having sex with little boys. I thought that was okay in liberal land, NAMBLA and all that stuff. Buggering little boys would make one a liberal icon or maybe an Obama adviser.
Kidding aside, reading the comments on a hard left blog is disgusting. I have a hard time not hating Muslims . The KOS KIDS and HUFFPO vermin are lower in my estimation. I think we could divorce the east coast and California citing irreconcilable differences.
I don’t even care about the politics of AGW, politics is politics, always will be. But I am increasingly appalled by the science. The so-called science. The alleged science. The not even close to science.
There is a 1998 paper floating around regarding CO2 that says the extinction distance for 15um infrared that CO2 absorbs at about 10 meters and then reemits at a mix of other frequencies. If that’s true, increases in CO2 mean absolutely nothing as a causal factor for purported global warming. Zip. Zero. Nada. Increased CO2 could still be a *consequence* of warming, AGW or natural. But cause is one thing, effect is another, and the whole Copenhagen thing about CO2 – is it really all about absolutely, positively NOTHING?
I guess it’s Seinfeld’s world, we’re just living in it.
–
Get better soon, Rush.
Happy New Year to wretchard and all Belmont Clubbers, posters and lurkers alike.
OT,
May the new year be better for us than the old. That is a modest wish. Rush in Hawaii, Obama in Hawaii, the possibilities are endless. If Rahm Emmanuel’s brother gets near the hospital then we will need a private security force, like in The Godfather.
I posted a long blog entry about an unpleasant issue related to DJ’s passing.
“However, the council’s ruling is a severe blow to both Sarkozy’s environmental plan as well as France’s budget for 2010. The government now has to find a way to come up with about 4.1 billion euros in revenue that was expected from the tax.”
Meanwhile in California,” So are tax revenues are declining again. Yes sir. Why is that? Well the global financial crisis is causing high unemployment, export and import is down in California, and we have a net outflow of people and industries moving to other states so our tax base is shrinking. Why are the jobs and people moving out? The two main complaints are over regulation and high taxes. So what can and what should we do about it.
Uhmmm raise taxes?”
#31 trangbang68
You are obviously not with the program. Haven’t you read the bright red, 50 point type label? It says right there that the Left is “kind”, “compassionate”, and “not full of hate”. That self-applied label gives them moral free rein to say and do literally anything to anybody; legal or otherwise.
If you want to impose some sort of moral consistency on their speech and actions, you must be one of those “right wing haters” and “proto-terrorists”.
I won’t put a sarc tag on it, because that is literally how Democrats think. There is no evil that they will not stoop to. Because 1) there is no “evil” in their world, other than freedom from state control, and 2) any act in service to the eventual dictatorship of the proletariat is praiseworthy to them.
When you look at places like Democratic Underground, etc.; keep in mind that despite the Democrats trying to create a sense of plausible deniability, everything they say or do is endorsed by the official Democratic Party. The only reason I do not say that it is directly written by the Democratic Party is that it is likely that they know that they could not do such a good job of being maniacs, as real maniacs. Thus they are content to make use of the work of real professionals in their field.
They ARE one entity. Keep in mind that during election campaigns there are link exchanges between DU, et. al., and the DNC and Democrat campaigns. You don’t exchange web links without the considered approval of both sides of the exchange. The ones spewing the most hate; Markos Moulitsas of DAILY KOS, Andrew Sullivan of the famed obsession with Sarah Palin’s uterus, and the DU/HuffPo crowd are treated as honored guests at Democratic National Conventions, being seated with ex-Presidents, and feted and cheered by the collectivist Nomenklatura. When they speak, however vile their emanations, it has as much political weight in reality as if it came directly from Robert Gibbs, the White House Press Secretary. One tyrannical Hydra, many heads, one mind with fell intent upon our Liberty.
Just consider what the outcome of Rush Limbaugh’s case would be if those treating him were ultimately beholden to the appointed Federal bureaucracy. And the DU crowd was in charge. For that matter, what the outcome would be if any of us here were in the same position. Political parameters rather than medical ones would be determinative in our treatment.
As far as comparing the hatred earned by the spokesmen for the Left -vs- hating Jihadi Muslims …. it is akin to choosing which to hate more between the members of the Axis Powers during WW-II or between the Soviets and the Communist Chinese during the Cold War. It is choosing between enemies allied in hatred for us.
The breadth and depth of any possible solution may be parallel to the historical process.
Subotai Bahadur
Subotai,
Thank you for bringing a clear definition to what I was feeling. I generally avoid DU and their ilk, but its a tell reading them in instances like this or Cheney’s heart attack. Happy New Years to all, maybe the worm turns our way, oh about November (See you around Reid!) If somehow Pelosi got kicked to the curb,I would have discovered their can be a utopia on earth. “Imagine, there’s no liberals, it’s easy if you try…”
Sergey, Marie Claude and all BCers -
s nupayashem novom godom!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rId95N2teUc&feature=related
Mr. X
Josh @ 32
Regarding Global Warming: It is worthwhile to remember that water vapor is a much stronger “greenhouse gas” than CO2, and there is also much more water vapor in the atmosphere than CO2. So any effect that CO2 concentration (going from 200 ppm to 400 ppm) has with respect to “Global Warming” is swamped by water vapor that is orders of magnitude higher in atmospheric concentration.
The only place that CO2 has an effect would be in cold, dry climates (Arctic and Antarctic?), where water vapor has been condensed out of the atmosphere by the low temperature.
Think about it. Only God can make water, but Man can burn “fossil fuels” that create CO2 as a by-rpoduct, which drive our economy, so there is guilt to be apportioned, and a tax to be levied to mitigate our sins.
Mr X, merci
we’re on the way to pass the line for 2010 in few hours,
I hope that this parody of a famous “hit” of the early eighties will amuse the BCers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85lBiQtXU4o
EN@ 38: If that paper is accurate, then doubling the CO2 will have zero (0) effect anywhere on the planet.
Here is the real reason that KSM should not be tried in Lower Manhattan: it will be cruel and unusual and just not FAIR when he drowns in his cell due to the rising seas of global warming.
If CO2 causes global warming, our asses should be just about poached by now.
Scary news from the New York Times, Published: June 11, 2006 – “Pollution From Chinese Coal Casts a Global Shadow”
Already, China uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. And it has increased coal consumption 14 percent in each of the past two years in the broadest industrialization ever. Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego.
To make matters worse, India is right behind China in stepping up its construction of coal-fired power plants — and has a population expected to outstrip China’s by 2030.
Burning fossil fuels also “creates” water.
I propose a tax on water as well as CO2.
We should not try to minimize our mitigation,
for we are doubly guilty.
Best Wishes for a happy and prosperous New Year to all at BC, whatever the odds of that may be. 2010 looks to be an, um, interesting year. Probably a pivotal one. Taking a cue from George S. Patton, make sure your part in it is something worthy of telling your grandkids about. Yeah, I know – happiness would be not having to worry about all this mess, and prosperity will be hard to come by for the non-Grifters in the POR economy. But perhaps you can find happiness in working for the future and prosperity of spirit for the short term. The most noble ambitions of the Human race will be at stake in the coming year. Whether your sentiments are closer to Wretchard’s optimism for a peacful revival, or Habu’s pessimism about a bloody trail, the more active and energetic good people are in the coming months, the less misery and heartache overall.
Odd that New Year’s Eve 2009 would have more of a fin de Siecle vibe than 1999, but there it is. Cheers everyone!
Allow this lurker to surface just long enough to wish all Belmonteers a happy new year.
Can I post here again? I promise I’ll never say anything negative about Megan McArtle again.
Happy to New Year for you all.
As for myself, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to quit posting on this site. I shall lurk here forever but really all I have to say is the same thing over and over again. Its time for me to stop and to quit taking up Wretchard’s bandwidth.
Thank you one and all for having put up with me. And once again–happy New Year.
Happy New Year to all.
OT, a bit. Just received this email from an old friend. Makes sense to me:
THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!!!!!
A friend sent this along to me. I can’t think of a reason to disagree.
I am sending this to virtually everybody on my e-mail list and that includes conservatives, liberals, and everybody in between. Even though we disagree on a number of issues, I count all of you as friends. My friend and neighbor wants to promote a “Congressional Reform Act of 2009″. It would contain eight provisions, all of which would probably be strongly endorsed by those who drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
I know many of you will say, “this is impossible”. Let me remind you, Congress has the lowest approval of any entity in Government, now is the time when Americans will join together to reform Congress – the entity that represents us.
We need to get a Senator to introduce this bill in the US Senate and a Representative to introduce a similar bill in the US House. These people will become American hero’s..
Thanks,
A Fellow American
Congressional Reform Act of 2010
1. Term Limits: 12 years only, one of the possible options below.
A. Two Six year Senate terms
B. Six Two year House terms
C. One Six year Senate term and three Two Year House terms
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
2. No Tenure / No Pension:
A congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security:
All funds in the Congressional retirement fund moves to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, Congress participates with the American people.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, server your term(s), then go home and back to work.
4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan just as all Americans.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
6. Congress looses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
7. Congress must equally abide in all laws they impose on the American people.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
8. All contracts with past and present congressmen are void effective 1/1/11 .
The American people did not make this contract with congressmen, congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
Sirius, amen
TCobb, you seriously underrate your contributions.
Happy New Year to all of you fine people here at BC, especially to our host.
In 2010 Cap & Trade will go through even if nobody on Europe is on board. A House bill condemning the House of Representatives would probably pass because no one reads them before they vote. Money talks. Liberals in Washington claim it’s saying “Spend Me”. Liberals will spend any amount of your money to protect animals, trees, terrorists, and murderers while killing babies and jobs. And whatever they can’t squeeze out of you they will borrow from China. It will be our unborn children who will end up paying for all of this climate-engineering-by-politics, assuming they even survive the first three trimesters.
Tonight I’m gonna party like it’s November 2010
No Rise of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years, New Research Finds
In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.
LOTM: How is it going with you, if you do not mind my asking?
LOTM – echoing Mongoose at #51 – I sure hope you went back to the previous post and read all the good wishes and prayers everyone sent.
Mongoose & Knight1,
Thank you both. I was just looking in before doing what every real New Yorker does on New Years Eve, hide under the covers. I copied the relevant bits from the last thread to my blog as a tribute and will add other bits over time. Your kind words, especially from those I have tousled with, mean a lot to me. Our genial host has said that he intends for the Club to be a gateway to other blogs, It proved to be so for Gates of Vienna which started here. That hopefully frees me from the sin of blog pimping.
Fact is I feel rotten. Physically a wreck, spent the last 4 days on the throne and swallowing little more than Bufferin™ for a leg I may have strained moving stuff around the beast the last days. Much of this I assume to be psychosomatic but I may have something in my system that is either opportunistic or related to what finally brought the baby down. If the VA is open tomorrow I may go in. As I note on my blog there is additional grief regarding a $700 cart I ordered for him that they shipped the day he died, a day earlier than they had promised. Normally faster service deserves praise but I don’t want to pay for it. Some of this is my fault but I was too emotional and unreasonable in hoping it would make a difference at this late date. What I really need to do is clean up myself and my apartment and get a job. Lawns Mowed.
Now maybe I am being haunted, I keep get messages to my bberry of comments from old closed threads that I am no longer subscribed to.
God bless you, Life o’.
It’s only words, I know, but you know we are with you, as much as anyone can be with you in this existential desert of Life.
God love us all.
Roger that about the covers.
bon “sans nous insulter, sans nous déchirer”… a message for the new year from our president
hey mother goose, la Cee, whose the thread was about ?
So I can notice that I am not the lonely one that makes digressions LMAO
uh some avoid bluntly the topic, merde alors ! LMAO
happy new year nonentheless !
Happy New Year everyone. Over and out until next year. Ciao.
it is one hour to midnight where I am, so I take this opportunity to wish all Belmonters a very Happy New Year!
Here it is again, the new year, full of promise as always. One hopes for the best, again as always, knowing one is doomed to disappointment. The coming year seems difficult enough, what with the Iranian nuclear bomb being ready sometime before the year is out, probably by summer, with Tel Aviv its target. Is 2010 the year the Middle East blows up? Will Iranian cities be reduced to cinders by an Israeli retaliatory strike? Will Israel wait for Tel Aviv to be incinerated or will they strike first? Will al Qaeda succeed in a major attack on a US target? Will the Democrats succeed in their quest to dismantle the finest health care system the world has ever seen? Will the Democrats succeed in destroying the economy of the United States with a punitive carbon cap and trade scheme? Maybe the baby boy in the top hat with the sash proclaiming it is now 2010 knows, but if he does, he isn’t saying.
That baby boy is here again
This time as baby 2010
He smiles as 09 slinks away
But knows he’ll look like that someday
He looks so fine on day the first
But knows full well the very worst
Will happen sometime down the road
But nonetheless does not forebode
We wish him well, this little chap
And hope the coming year mayhap
Will bring us all full peace and cheer
That lasts throughout the coming year
Happy New Year to all Belmonters!, with renewed liberty, peace and prosperity.
The malaise (irreconcilable hatreds and decadence) I’ve been perceiving has shifted from pre Civil War-ish to pre WWI-ish. May the upcoming decade be far better than that of a century ago.
Happy New Year Ya’ll!
(May we not live in interesting times!)
Josh @40 wrote: “If that paper is accurate, then doubling the CO2 will have zero (0) effect anywhere on the planet.”
Not quite. Extra CO2 will have an effect where the air is extremely dry, as happens in places where it is very cold.
If the Alleged Anthropogenic Global Warming crowd is right, then people in Siberia, Northern Canada, North Slope of Alaska will see a slight rise in the midnight midwinter temperature — probably enough to go from exclaiming “Good Lord! It’s damn cold!” to merely offering that old nautical expression “For crying out loud! This would freeze the balls off a Brass Monkey!”
Let’s remember our brothers in the frozen North, and pump out a little extra CO2 this New Year, just for them. Wishing everyone all the best for 2010 — especially LotM.
Halla-Loo-Year, Y’all!
Lest we forget among our trials and tribulations there are our Warriors who are in the fight of their lives and some have gone on before us…
Into Thine Hand
A safe and happy New Year for all, especially the Children.
Papa Ray
Wretchard, you are a calm, hardly-ever-flickering light in the darkness.
Happy New Year to you and all your interesting commentators!