December, 2018, Part 1, Political Class Insanity: Genital Mutilation Okay, The Clintons Bomb, and Obama's Never Resolved Scandals

It is another month which means it is again time to review the latest political class insanity from Washington and around the world. Political class insanity takes many forms including the wasting of taxpayer wealth, criminal fraud within government programs, inane and stupid political quotes and actions, the inability to create and implement effective and efficient government programs, stupid and ill performing economic policies and strategies, and other forms of insanity that continue to evolve and surprise and shock us.

Let’s get started:

1) The Minnesota state legislature is currently working on legislation that would ban the genital mutilation of young girls, a barbaric practice of the Muslim religion. One would think that everyone would want to ban this crude and painful process and that how could anyone support such terror practiced on young girls.

One would think that but one would be wrong, according to a recent Liberty Planet website article:

• Ilhan Omar, the first Muslim woman elected to Congress, says not so fast when it comes to banning female genital mutilation in the state.
• She is opposed to the bill “that is designed to impose harsh penalties to parents who force their girls to have this procedure.”
• She has stated that the bill is too harsh for offenders, i.e. those that commit genital mutilation against young girls, a stand that I personally find repulsive.
• The current proposed legislation would make the act a felony, would allow parents to lose custody of their kids for allowing such a process on their own daughters, and possibly prison terms.
• Only four members of the Minnesota House voted against the bill.

So now Ms. Omar will bring this position to Congress and the national stage. I cannot imagine what the reaction of liberals and Democrats would have been if a Republican or conservative came out and said that the mutilation of young girls is a good thing. And yet, in this country and age of female equality, a member of Congress dares to have this barbaric position. Insanity.

2) While we find most politicians to be useless, self serving, and never knowing when to just go away, the Clintons seem to have taken these traits to a new level. They are currently on a joint, Trump bashing speaking tour around the world, never missing an opportunity to make some big bucks off of their notoriety. But maybe, just maybe their run at doing anything to make a buck is finally coming to an end, according to an article on the Zero Hedge website by Tyler Durden:

• Only 3,300 tickets were sold to hear the Clintons up at the Scotiabank arena in Toronto, an arena that holds almost 20,000 people.
• As you can see, a lot of people showed up to hear them disguised as empty seats:

• This comes out to roughly an 83% vacancy rate.

• Hopefully the rest of the tour goes as badly and these folks will finally just go away, we do not need them going around the country and the world and bad mouthing the current, legally elected and so far, very successful President.

But another aspect that was interesting was the return of Hillary’s coughing fits. As you may recall, there were many times when she coughed so much in public that she could not speak. That trait returned again in Toronto, again causing speculation that she is not a healthy woman. Another reason for her to just go away, a two time, hateful lying politician that is possibly not healthy enough to stand up to the rigors of being President. To see her coughing fit, go to:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ai5aukEcFyUqcdKw65hyYtHVF_0iUS-JHEIZdtAxtnw/edit#

3) While it looks like Hillary Clinton is bombing in the present, much like she did in 2016, The Horn News website recently reminded us of five Obama scandal fails that were never resolved. Remember when Obama once claimed that his administration was scandal free? In fact, Matt Margolis, author of the book, “The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama” says that, “Many of Obama’s scandals covered in my book make Watergate look like a high school prank gone wrong by comparison.” His writing documents 29 major Obama scandals!

We have discussed the reality of how out of touch that claim is but let’s look back at five of his biggest scandals that were never fully resolved and its culprits brought to justice:

1-Obama was so desperate to sign a nuclear arms treaty with Iran that he actually short circuited a major anti-drug effort by the Federal government. According to reporting to left leaning Politico, Iran’s terrorist proxies, Hezbollah, were working with South American drug cartels to sell cocaine in the U.S. to fund their terror activities. They also used used car dealerships in the U.S. to launder their drug money.

The Feds were close to shutting down the terror/drug connection via their Project Cassandra. But Iran threatened to not sign Obama’s nuclear agreement if this drug operation was shut down. Obama, desperate for some type, any type of legacy folded immediately. As a result he signed a ridiculously lousy agreement and allowed terrorists to continue to addict American kids and fund their terror efforts.

2- He promised to close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay but a) failed at that effort and b) he ended up freeing hundreds of terrorists from Guantanamo Bay but many (224) ended up returning to terrorism, endangering American soldiers and citizens around the world. When asked, “Is there a possibility of some of them trying to return to activities that are detrimental to us?” he replied “Absolutely.” He just didn’t care.

3- Obama actually had the gall to spy on Congress, a clear violation of the Constitution and the separations of power as envisioned by the Founders. He did so to try and identify and punish whistleblowers who were telling the world and Congress how corrupt the Obama administration was. According to Senator Chuck Grassley: “The CIA under the Obama administration was reading congressional staff’s e-mails.” 

4- We have often discussed how Obama attacked companies that dared to not support him (see Gibson guitars) or used taxpayer money to favor his political supporters (see Solyndra). But consider this extensive abuse of government power to support his friends: “Obama hated businesses — but he only tried to ruin companies if it would make his friends big bucks.

Two of his buddies, Marty Nesbitt and Harreld Kirkpatrick III, formed an investment firm called Vistria right about the time Obama got re-elected. Obama spent his second term attacking companies — payday lenders, coal mines, for-profit colleges — that they wanted to buy…and driving down their stock prices. “A curious pattern began to emerge,” wrote researcher Peter Schweizer in his book Secret Empires: How Our Politicians Hide Corruption and Enrich Their Families and Friends. “Obama and his administration would attack industries with government power, which led to substantially lower valuations for these companies. Nesbitt and Vistria, or others close to Obama, could then acquire those assets for pennies on the dollar.” It pays to have friends in high places!”

5- Obama not only spied on just about every American’s electronic communications and on Congress, but he also apparently spied on Trump’s election campaign. Mr. Margolis thinks this is Obama’s worst scandal: “There are many serious scandals, and therefore it’s hard to say which is the biggest scandal but I believe Obama’s spying on the Trump campaign, which is starting to be fully unraveled now, will likely prove to be one of the biggest.”

Obama’s extensive scandals, Hillary’s flop in Canada, and Obama exacerbating Americans’ drug addictions for a personal, shallow political legacy. More insanity to follow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

November, 2018, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care:Why Medicare For All Stinks and Why Trump Has Made Healthcare Better

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and copays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care. To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

1) We have often reviewed how horribly the Federal government’s track record has been when providing healthcare to the American public:

• Medicare is going bankrupt with tens of trillions of dollars in predicted unfunded liabilities.
• Medicare and Medicaid lose tens of billions of dollars every year to incompetence and criminal fraud.
• The Veterans Administration has been so inept that thousands of veterans have had to wait months just to get an appointment to see a doctor with untold numbers dying before they could actually get a doctor’s appointment.
• Obama Care never came close to attaining its stated goals along every financial, medical and health insurance perspective.

And yet, despite this horrid track record in the healthcare industry, many Washington politicians think it would be a good idea for the Federal government to control EVERY aspect of Americans’ health care needs. They even have a name for this travesty, “Medicare For All.” 

Jack Crowe, writing for the National Review website, described how idiotic this concept is,besides the track record of failure in this area in the past:

• A viable estimate of the cost of “Medicare for All” concludes that the concept would cost the Federal government, and American taxpayer, $32.6 TRILLION over just the first ten years.
• This is the estimate that as developed by a forecasting model developed by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
• This estimate is in line with another study that was done independently by the liberal Urban Institute.
• This average cost of $3.26 TRILLION a year is almost equal to the total amount of record setting Federal tax revenue collected in 2017, i.e. the country would have to double the amount of wealth going to the Federal government every year to pay for this program.
• This $3.26 TRILLION a year, if paid in taxes, is wealth that could not be used to support and grow the economy, depressing economic growth and the financial well being of the country with no guarantee the Federal government could even execute such a big effort in light of its failures listed above.
• In fact, the study found that “the government could double all corporate and individual income taxes and it would still lack requisite revenue to fund the program.”
• Specifically, “Enacting something like ‘Medicare for all’ would be a transformative change in the size of the federal government,” said Charles Blahous, the study’s author.
• Bernie Sanders, rather than read and criticize the study based on its merits, decided to attack the study’s credibility solely based on the reality that his political enemies, the Koch brothers, fund some of the activities of the Mercatus Center:“If every major country on earth can guarantee health care to all, and achieve better health outcomes, while spending substantially less per capita than we do, it is absurd for anyone to suggest that the United States cannot do the same.” 
• This is a totally self serving and incorrect statement since in our previous post we showed that single payer systems like “Medicare for All” has not delivered what Sanders claim they have.

As we have said before, any single payer health care system is a stupid idea that refuses to die, similar to just about every other idea or program that Washington politicians all too often come up with.

2) Trump has made some pretty substantial changes to Obama Care’s tenets and rules and, of course, liberals and Democrats have cried disaster all along the process, claiming that Trump is heartless and causing health care suffering among Americans. But according to reality as described by Warren Todd Huston in a November 6, 2018 article for the Godfather Politics website, Trump’s changes have actually made health care better for millions of Americans:

• Mr. Huston cites an article in the New York Post by Mary Vought that showed that Trump has made life easier for Americans who are chronically ill and others with pre-existing conditions.
• Trump has encouraged the Food and Drug Administration to speed up the approval of generic drugs which generally cost less than equivalent brand name drugs.
• In Trump’s first two years the FDA has approved over 1,900 generic drugs while only 1,143 were approved in the last two years of the Obama administration.
• An analysis by the Council of Economic Advisors found that drug price growth over the past two years probably saved consumers about $26 billion.
• Trump also signed the “Right To Try” legislation that allows terminally ill patients to try experimental drugs as a last ditch effort to save their lives.
• Also, according to the article: “The Trump administration has expanded access to more coverage options — not fewer as Obamacare did...To individuals who can’t afford pricey ObamaCare plans, changes to short-term, limited-duration insurance will give alternatives with more reasonable rates — and a guarantee that they can maintain their coverage should they develop a costly illness that requires treatment after their plans’ expiration date.”
• Trump also eased Medicaid rules to allow states to better their Medicaid rules to more efficiently handle the needy in their states since according to Ms. Vought, “Disability groups aligned with Democrats didn’t mention it at the time, but ObamaCare effectively created a two-tier Medicaid system — with individuals with disabilities and other vulnerable populations at the back of the line. Under the Affordable Care Act, states get 90 cents from Washington for every dollar they spend covering able-bodied adults, but only 50 to 75 cents for covering individuals with disabilities. That has led states that expanded Medicaid under ObamaCare to treat people with disabilities as lower priorities.”

So, Trump’s Obama Care’s changes made drugs less expensive, gave no hope to the really sick Americans in this country, made it easier to get insurance policies that fit a person’s needs, and made it easier for the truly needy to get Medicaid help for their health needs. Yeah, he really screwed things up [sarcasm.]

More unfolding disasters of Obama Care next month are highly likely since Obama Care is the law that keeps on giving...bad news.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

November, 2018, Part 1 , The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: A Stupid Politician, More English Single Payer Failures, and More

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and copays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

1) We start today’s discussion on the failures of Obama Care with a videotape clip from 2017 that I recently came across. It contains an assertion by Congresswoman Maxine Walters and it is totally ridiculous. During an interview on MSNBC Walters stated that 700 billion people would lose their health insurance as a result of Trump’s actions. 

Now, 700 billion is a lot of people who will lose healthcare insurance especially since there are far less than 8 billion people in the entire world. Think about this reality: this is the type of person who wants to be in charge of your entire healthcare future, either via Obama Care or the bigger disaster, a single payer health care system. Do you really want to trust your future health care needs to someone like this who has no concept of reality?

Her idiotic statement can be seen at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ndt0qM05cIg

As a side note: the interviewer does not even try to correct her insanity, another example of the mainstream press accepting anything that Democrats say without ever questioning the validity of it.

2) Speaking of a single payer healthcare system, many Democrats still think that would be a good idea for the U.S. even though the concept has failed miserably around the world. We have shown how bad the system is in previous posts where we see that health care quality, quantity, and health care access goes down substantially when a single payer system is put in place:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2018/09/september-2018part-2-unfolding-disaster.html

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2018/01/january-2018-part-1-unfolding-disaster.html

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2017/02/february-2017-part-5-unfolding-disaster.html

This reality in England was proven again in a recent headline in a leading London newspaper which said that: “A Million People A Week Cannot See a GP” [a regular doctor]. To see a copy of the actual article got to: 

https://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2017/07/08/ari-fleischer-shares-newspaper-headline-from-the-single-payer-future-liberals-want/?utm_campaign=socialflow_twitchy&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social

The good news under a single payer system is that you now have health care coverage but the bad news is that you cannot receive health care coverage. A single payer health care system: a bad idea that refuses to die.

3) One of the major problems we always had with Obama Care is that it forced Americans to do things that were against their will, a clear violation of their First Amendment rights. And this forced coercion usually related to birth control. If a charity or hospital or company did not want to implement the draconian rules of Obama Care relative to birth control and abortion, they were then most likely sued for having their morals dare to conflict with Obama Care.

Fortunately, according to a recent article on the Liberty Planet website, Trump is relieving this violation of the First Amendment:

• According to the article, “Under Obamacare, employers had little choice in the matter of contraception coverage or religious freedom; they had to cover birth control pills and even abortion, even if their faith and beliefs oppose these methods.”
• The Department of Health and Human Services under Trump is now rolling back some of these requirements in order to allow people and companies to live their lives as they see fit regarding abortion and birth control.
• Insurance companies are no longer required to provide such services within their health insurance plans: they can provide them but do not HAVE to provide them.

A good start in restoring freedom and killing off another anti-freedom, stupid Obama Care tenet. More Obama Care insanity to follow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

November, 2018, Part 2,I Am A Global Warming Doubter and A Believer In Science: Bad Political Policy Caused The California Wildfires, Not Global Warming

Every month we have enough material to return to a continuing theme in this blog, namely that “I am a global warming doubter AND a believer in science.” This became of interest because of people like Al Gore who fanatically and verbosely claimed that you had to be an idiot to not believe in manmade global warming. It has been my life belief that anyone that is that loud and that obnoxious is hiding something, that rather than argue facts and reality it is better to beat down and insult anyone who disagrees.

As we have dove into the whole issue of man made global warming, or its new rebranded title of climate change, we found that Al Gore and people like him were guilty of a number of things:

• Ignoring science and realities that did not support their opinions and positions.
• Rather than have an adult conversation about climate, these types of advocates like Gore sank to the level of insulting those who dared look at ALL science by calling them a variety of names including racists, homophobes, terrorists, flat earth believers, and other slanderous names.
• Continuing to insist that politicians step up their intrusions into our lives with higher taxes, more regulations, and more control on our freedoms and standards of living based on a shaky theory at best.

To see the past posts and the multitude of evidence that we have compiled that showed it is perfectly okay to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, enter the phrase "global warming doubter” in the search box above or go through the monthly historical post listed on the right side of this page.

Thus, let’s see the latest facts and science that prove you can be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, regardless of what Al Gore proclaim.

1) Unless you are totally out of touch with current events, you know that California is suffering through some massive wildfires. Tragically, many have died, many more are missing and the property damage is massive. Of course, global warming advocates are never going to pass up a tragedy like this to advocate for their climate and global warming positions, even if it means pathetically doing their advocacy when people are still grieving and suffering.

But before we get to this current wildfire situation let’s review the reality from wildfires in a scientific, data driven, reality perspective. Consider the following set of real data that we have previously talked about concerning wildfires:

Wild Fires

Research by James Taylor, writing for Forbes magazine, found that “2013 was one of the quietest wildfire years in U.S. history.” If global warming/climate change was such a bad thing from a weather perspective, one could expect to see a growing trend of wildfires as severe weather, droughts, etc. resulting in more wildfires.

But according to a government agency, the National Interagency Fire Center, an entity that tracks the number of forest fires every year and has been doing so since 1960, well before global warming theory took hold: 

• The year 2013 had the fewest forest fires since data tracking began.
• From 1962 through 1982, there were at least 100,000 forest fires tracked every one of those years. But since 1982 there has not been a single year where forest fires totalled above 100,000.
• Fifty years prior, in 1964, forest fires totalled three times as many vs. 2014 and burned up twice as many acres.
• Twenty years ago, in 1994, there were 79,000 forest fires vs. 63,000 in 2014.

But this is not the only source of real data that shows forest fires, and the severe weather that might affect them, is down on a historical basis despite global warming/climate change:

• According to the Weather Underground, the two largest forest fires in American history occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• The first of these forest fires occurred in Wisconsin 1871 and burned 3.8 million acres and killed 1,500 people.
• The second worse forest fire hit Idaho and Montana in 1910 and destroyed 3 million acres and killed 87 people.
• The 47,579 forest fires in 2013 destroyed only 4.3 million acres, an average of 90.79 acres per fire.
• Furthermore, research in 2009 analysis by R.M. Beaty and A.H. Taylor researched charcoal records in northern California to study wildfires over thousands of years. They concluded that “current fire episode frequency is at one of its lowest points in at least the last 14,000 years.” And certainly manmade global warming and climate change was not a topic of concern or a reality 14,000 years ago.

That whole post where the above passage was taken, a post that also looks at other types of natural disasters, can be accessed at:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2015/06/june-2015-part-4-i-am-global-warming.html

So yes, the California wildfires raging today are very, very bad. But are they really just a statistical anomaly which is what real data would show? You cannot take one situation, today’s California wildfires, and all of a sudden throw out thousands of years worth of real data to conclude man made global warming is the culprit. One data point is not a trend.

Let’s look at another set of real data from that same post referenced above:

Roger Pielke Jr. is an environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in Colorado. On may 22, 2015 he a graph on his blog that showed a slight DECREASE in global droughts since 1982, a time period of extensive worries about global warming and weather. His data is based on a 2013 publication in the magazine Nature which tracked “historical drought severity data.”

Fraction of the Globe in Drought: 1982-2012



The graph above shows the proportion of the planet in drought, by intensity, 1982-2012. The graph comes from a paper in a new Nature publication called Scientific Data and is open access.

So, again, the California wildfires are bad. But from a historical perspective, the world is not in a drought infested state, the historical data shows that if anything, drought situations are slowly decreasing over time, a direct contradiction of what global warming advocates would tell us.So if the long term trend for drought and wildfires is down as measured by real data, a direct contradiction of what global warming advocates measure by real hysteria, what could possibly be going on in California to fuel these current fires?Consider a recent Forbes article from November 16, 2018 by Chuck DeVore, Texas Public Policy Foundation VP and former California legislator. The title of his article is, “California's Deadliest Fires Could Have Been Mitigated By Prevention.” Given his background as a California politician, and years spent with the state’s National Guard fighting disasters, he does have some credibility about talking about his current state’s situation:

• He starts off the article by recognizing how bad the situation is: “At least 63 people have been killed with 631 reported missing in the California fires as thousands of firefighters, including 200 sent from Texas as well as other states, battle to contain the blazes. More than 7,000 structures have been destroyed, including up to 90 percent of the homes in Paradise, population 26,682, in Northern California’s Butte County. More than a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in both the north of the state by the Camp Fire and by other fires in Southern California, Hill and Woolsey.”
• Given his first hand experience, it is his experienced opinion that political policy bears at least some of the blame for these massive fires.
• He cites the opinion of Mike Marcucci, the assistant chief of CAL FIRE, California’s main firefighting agency, who in a recent interview blamed decades of political policy of discouraging controlled burns as a safety precaution to reduce the natural wood fuel that feeds massive wildfires.
• These needed burns were decreased as a result of environmental lawsuits and the fear of air quality degradation, a concern that has certainly backfired big time with the air degradation caused by these wildfires which have been many times greater than what would have happened under much smaller, controlled burns.
• Real data show that in the three decades before 1990, lumber companies annually took out 10-12 billion board feet of lumber from our national forests, much of which is located in California.
• By 2013, environmental policies had reduced that annual forest thinning down to a meager 2.5 billion board feet.
• Concurrent with that reduction, the thinning of underbrush and dead trees also declined dramatically.
• According to the article, the following simple truth is that, “Harvesting trees on public land is controversial but helps pay for needed brush clearing. Many environmental groups vigorously oppose both. But fighting the larger, hotter fires that result without active forest management is even more costly and threatens lives.”
• California, and its much tighter environmental controls and higher and higher prices for forest harvesting permits, has cut employment in the lumber industry by half since the 1990s, and with that has led to the overgrowth of the forests in the state.
• Of course, global warming advocates like California governor Jerry Brown ignored all of this reality when he blamed the fires on, no surprise, global warming, “During this summer’s fires, outgoing California Governor Jerry Brown blamed the record-breaking fires on climate change. In a press conference he warned that the level of climate change-induced forest fires predicted in 20 to 30 years were “now occurring in real time.””

It is tragically ironic that the zeal of environmentalists and global warming advocates along with stupid political and environmental policies have likely resulted in the intensity and death and destruction of these recent fires. These current wildfires have likely given off 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, about 12% of the state’s entire annual emissions in addition to creating incredibly bad air quality, the exact opposite of what environmentalists advocate for. As we said above, one data point, the current fires, do not represent a trend. But leaving behind billions and billions of lumber board feet not harvested along with the ever growing underbrush and dead trees that go with it, is a trend that has resulted in the current wildfire situation in the state, not global warming.2) When Trump recently suggested that bad environmental policies had contributed mightily to the current California wildfires, Governor Jerry Brown pooh poohed the idea since he is one of the biggest global warming advocates around, data, science, and reality be damned. But after the camera and news crews left the area after Trump’s visit and Brown’s retort, something curious happened:

• According to Emily Zanotti, writing for the Daily Wire on November 19, 2018, Brown quietly starting urging California politicians to undo some of the environmental legislation that so greatly reduced logging in the state and created the current combustible disaster that exists today in the state’s forests.
• In fact, he is not suggesting minor tweeks, according to the Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper, some of his proposed changes are the most significant changes in the state’s logging industry in almost 50 years: "Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing broad new changes to California's logging rules that would allow landowners to cut larger trees and build temporary roads without obtaining a permit as a way to thin more forests across the state." 
• Specifically: "Under Brown's proposal, private landowners would be able to cut trees up to 36 inches in diameter - up from the current 26 inches - on property 300 acres or less without getting a timber harvest permit from the state, as long as their purpose was to thin forests to reduce fire risk. They also would be able to build roads of up to 600 feet long without getting a permit, as long as they repaired and replanted them." 

So Trump gets crucified by global warming advocates for suggesting the need for more forest pruning and better forest management. But when one of the global warming heroes, Brown, proposes the same thing, crickets from the global warming crowd. The hypocrisy is deafening.To the man made global warming/climate change advocates, please stop knee jerking. Look at data, look at history, be logical and not hysterical and maybe then we can all have a mature, adult, reality based discussion on climate. Until then, I will continue to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w