The Urban Grind

Here’s what Gore said in a recent appearance in New York:

“One of the things we could do about it is to change the technologies, to put out less of this pollution, to stabilize the population, and one of the principle ways of doing that is to empower and educate girls and women,” Gore said. “You have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management so women can choose how many children have, the spacing of the children.

“You have to lift child survival rates so that parents feel comfortable having small families and most important — you have to educate girls and empower women,” he said. “And that’s the most powerful leveraging factor, and when that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices and more balanced choices.”

No doubt this audience was mostly white liberals. Now I would love to see Gore go into a rough neighborhood in Detroit (which is probably most of that city) and tell an audience of welfare recipients and drug addicts the same thing. Or how about a meeting of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund. Of course that would never happen in a million years, since we’re talking about Democrat voters with both examples. But still if any white politician were to tell these groups to have fewer children, all hell would break loose.

Hat tip: David Ben Ze’ev Aryeh

These liberal idiots in the local Seattle government who decided this deserve to slip on that ice and crack their skulls.

To hear the city’s spin, Seattle’s road crews are making “great progress” in clearing the ice-caked streets.

But it turns out “plowed streets” in Seattle actually means “snow-packed,” as in there’s snow and ice left on major arterials by design.

“We’re trying to create a hard-packed surface,” said Alex Wiggins, chief of staff for the Seattle Department of Transportation. “It doesn’t look like anything you’d find in Chicago or New York.”

The city’s approach means crews clear the roads enough for all-wheel and four-wheel-drive vehicles, or those with front-wheel drive cars as long as they are using chains, Wiggins said.

The icy streets are the result of Seattle’s refusal to use salt, an effective ice-buster used by the state Department of Transportation and cities accustomed to dealing with heavy winter snows.

“If we were using salt, you’d see patches of bare road because salt is very effective,” Wiggins said. “We decided not to utilize salt because it’s not a healthy addition to Puget Sound.”

OK, two can play at this game. I don’t think those stupid, Gaia worshiping Seattle liberals who decided this are a healthy addition to the human gene pool! How about that?

But wait. There’s more!

Seattle also equips its plows with rubber-edged blades. That minimizes the damage to roads and manhole covers, but it doesn’t scrape off the ice, Wiggins said.

Unfortunately, the leftist rot in Seattle is not just limited to leaving ice on roads. Remember the late “St. Pancake” Israel hater Rachel Corrie was from the nearby area

Then there was also that lovely Seattle resident James Ujama, who in 2003, plead guilty to aiding the Taliban. And let’s not forget that National Guardsman Ryan Anderson, who suddenly converted to Islam, and betrayed America by giving Al Qaeda information on U.S. troops, and how to kill them. Or how about the Millenium bomber Ahmed Ressam who was convicted and sentenced to 22 years in prison for the plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Years Eve 1999. Ressam was given a very light sentence by a leftist Seattle judge.

But wait. There’s even more.

Remember that jihadi Seattle barber who was fortunately killed in Somalia a while back while fighting for Al Qaeda? Then there was that Gambian terror cell also based in Seattle.

Moronic moonbats and terrorists flock together.

According to Newsbusters, that’s what he told The San Francisco Chronicle in a January 2008 interview.

Let me sort of describe my overall policy.

What I’ve said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s out there.

I was the first to call for a 100% auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter. That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.

That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel and other alternative energy approaches.

The only thing I’ve said with respect to coal, I haven’t been some coal booster. What I have said is that for us to take coal off the table as a (sic) ideological matter as opposed to saying if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it.

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can.
It’s just that it will bankrupt them.

Here’s the video.

Now can you imagine the uproar if McCain ever said something about bankrupting an entire American industry? We would never hear the end of it. And mind you, the Chronicle left out the part about bankrupting the coal industry, like the good little Obamabots they are.

Here’s what Angry Chinese Kahanist has to say:

This carbon bull is an outrage. He does not want us to be energy independent.

He wants to rob the coal miners and redistribute that money to something thats not even viable like solar and wind. Solar is not practical because it takes up a huge amount of horizontal space to make a little energy.

If you have a house and cover all of your roof with solar panels, it will power maybe a few refrigerators. It will not cover your heating or air conditioners because they use a huge amount of energy.

This is so typical of the left. First they gave us the Community Reinvestment Act, which is the cause of the financial mess we’re in. And now Obama wants to cut our defenses and kill our industries!

The Arctic may hold 90 billion barrels of oil!

Of course the Democrats and their environmentalist minions will whine about how it will take us years to make that oil available, and that the polar bears will suffer for it, blah, blah, blah.

Now in case you haven’t noticed, I love baby polar bears! But if it’s a choice between them having a “pristine” habitat, and Americans being forced to give money to Middle East rogue states for their oil, I say to hell with the bears and other animals!

Apparently, former Vice President Al Gore doesn’t think we’re paying enough for oil.

“The idea that we can drill our way out of this is just so absurd,” he said, comparing the push for offshore oil drilling — which has gained popularity and put environmentalists on the defense — to dealing with a hangover by having another drink.

“The defenders of the status quo are the ones who have dug us into this hole,” he said, commenting that Americans have been “so often fooled into finding a remedy for a problem” that has nothing to do with the problem at hand — pointing to the invasion of Iraq when America was attacked by terrorists in Afghanistan as an example.

“The engines of distraction and the great concentrated power of communication that you’ve seen turned on this issue or that issue is already hard at work,” he says. “They will say we can’t switch away from oil.”

“We have to switch our electricity generation system,” he says, noting that changing transportation fuels will take longer, before reiterating his plan to ensure that “100 percent of our electricity [comes] from renewable sources and carbon-constrained fuels over the next 10 years.”

Democrats, RINO’s and their enviro-wacko minions have a whole litany of excuses for why American cannot become energy independent. They’ll say “We can’t drill our way out of an energy crisis, it will take decades for the oil to flow, oil company profits are the real culprit,” etc.

Now personally, I say we need to find something besides oil in order to rid ourselves of the blackmailing from the Middle East rogue states. But for now, I’ll be happy with domestic oil. So keep these facts handy whenever someone pompously tells you that drilling for oil in Alaska or off the Gulf of Mexico would not be

Basically, we have the envirowackos to thank for it.

(CNSNews.com) – Huge basins of untapped oil can be found on federal lands throughout the United States, according to a new report from the federal government. But much of it cannot — and may never be — recovered, because it lies under national parks and national monuments, or it is subject to environmental laws and restrictions that make drilling prohibitive.

The report, which was produced at the request of Congress by the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM), said there are 279 million acres under federal management where oil and gas could potentially could be extracted.

More than half of it is totally off-limits to drillers.

“The total onshore resource is 31 billion barrels,” said BLM’s lead scientist Richard Watson, who authored the report. “Of that, 19 billion barrels are currently inaccessible or 62 percent. A little over 2 billion barrels, or 8 percent, is accessible under what we call standard lease terms.”

If you add in the 85.9 billion barrels of oil that lie offshore, as determined by the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, there are 117 billion barrels of oil on lands owned or managed by the U.S. government.

But all expansion of offshore oil recovery is currently off-limits.

{snip}

…Much of the oil is off-limits because of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Historic Preservation Act.

We can also thank the envirowackos for the rising costs of flights, cars, tires, toiletries, plastic packaging, and computer screens, among other things.

So how about a Human Endangered Species Act? That’s really what we’ll be if we keep sending money to these Middle East rogue states.

Most people naively believe that environmentalists do what they because they want to increase our quality of life, and our general well being. But they are mistaken. These people view their fellow human beings as nothing more than interlopers raping their beloved gaia.

This little online quiz is just one example.

They are all bent out of shape over the fences impact on Sonoran pronghorns, jaguars, ocelots, and long nosed bats.

Some wildlife researchers have grown so concerned about the consequences of bisecting hundreds of miles of rugged habitat that they have talked of engaging in civil disobedience to block the fence’s construction.

“This wall is so asinine, and so wrong, I am one of a dozen scientists ready to lay our bodies down in front of tractors,” Healy Hamilton, who directs the Center for Biodiversity Research and Information at the California Academy of Sciences, told colleagues at a recent scientific retreat here. “This is one thing we might be able to stop.”

“Make it 13!” said Allison Jones, a conservation biologist at the Wild Utah Project, an advocacy group.

So if these people had their way, our middle class, public schools, hospitals and cities would be destroyed. But these nutjobs would still be happy, as long as their beloved ocelots are left alone.

Supposedly, Congress is now acting all serious about building a fence on our Souther border. They’ve given Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff the go ahead to ignore any laws that would stand in the way of the building the fence.

Of course you can tell the Times doesn’t like this just by looking at the title of this article. I mean, who the hell is Adam Liptak to say that building the border fence is “above the law?” That is for a judge to decide. His job is to merely report.

The secretary of homeland security was granted the power in 2005 to void any federal law that might interfere with fence building on the border. For good measure, Congress forbade the courts to second-guess the secretary’s determinations. So long as Mr. Chertoff is willing to say it is necessary to void a given law, his word is final.

The delegation of power to Mr. Chertoff is unprecedented, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service. It is also, if papers filed in the Supreme Court last month are correct, unconstitutional.

Notice how the Times is in such a tizzy over the border fence actually getting built? I guess they’re worried that they’ll no longer be able to publish countless sob stories about “hard working immigrants” who are afraid of being deported or racially profiled because they broke our laws.

Also, who is the Times or this Congressional Research Service to say what is constitutional or not? That will be for the Supreme Court to decide, now that two enviro-wacko groups, Defenders of Wildlife, and The Sierra Club.

These liberal bedwetters are practically soiling themselves for fear of losing their stranglehold on our judicial branch.

Now if all this business about building a border fence sounds too good to be true, that’s because it it. Naturally, the Democrats are fighting like mad to keep their monopoly on the illegal alien/anchor baby vote. They are challenging President Bush’s plan to have 470 miles of the fence built.

Fourteen House Democrats, including eight committee chairmen, said yesterday that they will file a brief supporting a legal challenge to the Bush administration’s plans to finish building 470 miles of fencing and other barriers on the U.S.-Mexico border by the end of the year.

Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) led the group, which includes the heads of the energy and commerce, transportation, intelligence, education, rules, and veteran affairs panels.