Arnold Schwarzenegger's Business Shakedown Legacy

The one thing that Arnold Schwarzenegger has touted as a crowning achievement in his otherwise disastrous tenure as California's governor, which ended in 2010, is the enactment of "cap and trade" legislation. One of the features of this state law, which is set to take effect in 2013, is the auction sale of "carbon credits" by the state to businesses that may emit pollutants at levels that are in excess of what is legally permitted.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the entire premise for cap and trade legislation - anthropogenic global warming - is bullshit. Recently, the Science and Public Policy Institute in Virginia released a report which found that if the United States just stopped emitting carbon dioxide altogether, "the ultimate impact on projected global temperature rise would be a reduction, or a 'savings,' of approximately 0.08°C by the year 2050 and 0.17°C by the year 2100--amounts that are, for all intents and purposes, negligible."

So that carbon credit auction California had a few days ago pursuant to its impending cap and trade law? A pure scam. More significantly, though, businesses that couldn't afford to purchase any carbon credits are going to shut down, move out of the state or pass on whatever emissions fines they have to pay onto consumers.

Thanks for nothing, Arnold, you clusterf&*k of miserable fail.

Astro Turf Much?

How many of the protesters in this video are actual Wal-Mart employees, I can't say. Seeing as how most of them were specially bused in (probably by a labor union) and nobody would give a responsive answer to why they were there protesting, I'm willing to bet almost none.



h/t Gateway Pundit

Rush Limbaugh on Thanksgiving

Historically speaking, Thanksgiving was basically a celebratory rejection of what came to be known as socialism.

...Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives." That's not what it was. "Here is the part that has been omitted: The original contract the Pilgrims had entered into with their merchant-sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share." It was a commune. It was socialism. "All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well," not to the individuals who built them.

"Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to the Pilgrims as that first harsh winter, which had taken so many lives. He decided to take bold action. Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage." They could do with it whatever they wanted. He essentially turned loose the free market on 'em. "Long before Karl Marx was even born, the Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism." And they found that it didn't work.

(...)

...So what did they try next? Free enterprise. "Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products. And what was the result? 'This had very good success,' wrote Bradford, 'for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.'" They had miraculous results. In no time they found they had more food than they could eat themselves. So they set up trading posts. They exchanged goods with the Indians. The profits allowed them to pay off the people that sponsored their trip in London. The success and the prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans, began what became known as the great Puritan migration.

And they shared their bounty with the Indians. Actually, they sold some of it to 'em. The true story of Thanksgiving is how socialism failed.

Read all of Rush's monologue here. And Happy Thanksgiving! Here's hoping we can restore it to being a celebration, rather a memorial, to free market capitalism.

The Liberal Stupid is Outta Control

This is a news report on the Thanksgiving-Eve protest organized by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) against LAX. The thing of it is, SEIU doesn't even represent LAX workers. Anyway, watch, laugh, and/or cry at what non-airport workers who were at the protest supporting SEIU say. Or are they "baaaaa"-ing?